"Once Upon a Time in Gaza" opens like a Beastie Boys video, the same scratchy picture and music quality, men in keffiyeh holding guns and kicking IDF soldiers about. We then see a martyr’s procession and slowly arrive at the film’s primary reality with the credits appearing, the names of the Nasser brothers signaling we might be in Cohen brothers black comedy territory.
When we start with the adventures of Osama and Yahya, two small-time crooks pushing soft drugs in Gaza, the camera angles and the dialogue of the Nasser brothers are as enticing as any crime noir – a genre that seems to have been abandoned by Hollywood and so has a classic and classy feel to it in this Gazan reincarnation. The duo’s method is getting medical prescriptions for their alleged chronic pains, multiplying the prescriptions and then buying them from all over pharmacies in Gaza – so as small-time as it gets. You can imagine this setup calls for the two men to spend a lot of time in their "getaway" car and bickering away, which in turn means the momentum of the film very much depends on these two actors.
In Majd Eid as Osama and Nader Abd Alhay as Yahya, the Nasser brothers have found a gold mine. Eid’s face, facial hair, sunglasses and leather jacket all seem to have their own roles, as he makes them all act like they have speaking parts. You feel like you could watch Eid driving through Gaza smoking for the rest of the film in a one-man (and leather jacket) performance. And when you search for the directors Tarzan and Arab Nasser online, you learn that these are pseudonyms for Ahmed and Mohammed, identical twins and that physically they have modelled Osama, the anti-hero of the film after themselves.
Although it would be a certain kind of joy just to watch Eid drive through Gaza, the Nasser brothers do take us through a plot. As in any good noir, there is a bent cop who wants a cut from Osama’s earnings, and there is an excellent scene in a fish restaurant where they hurl covert and not-so-covert threats to one another. You understand that the Nasser brothers are not doing this scene as a set piece either, because the conversation does have consequences and then the first part of this crime noir comes to an end.
In the second half, we follow Yahya, now alone, dispirited, wasting his time at cafes no longer properly working his shawarma joint, which was the cover for the drug operation. On one of these days, he is headhunted, not by Hamas, but by a film director, who is making a film about the latest martyr in Gaza. It is at this point that we remember the sequence at the beginning of the film and where it starts getting all a bit meta. Yahya agrees to be the "hero" and we see Gazans taking part in the filming, dads going berserk when they see their children getting beaten by Palestinian actors who play IDF soldiers and these actors themselves abandoning the scene because they can’t bear playing Israelis. Yahya doesn’t really have to act, but he looks like the martyr and so is celebrated everywhere, including the Ministry of Culture, which takes special interest in the film. It is on one of his visits there that he meets his friend’s nemesis, the bent cop, and a plan for revenge crystallizes in his mind.
"Once Upon a Time in Gaza" reminded me of the short film "Sorry Cinema" directed by Ahmad Hassouna as part of the "From Ground Zero" collection (2024), where a director shares scenes of the film he was shooting along with the destruction that Israel is raining down on Gaza. Hassouna talks about how he had dreams of attending international film festivals and so it is a bit eerie to see that the Nasser brothers’ films have made it out of Gaza – making the audience wonder if any of the filming was actually in Gaza itself. "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" was shown at the Cannes and Sarajevo Film Festivals and is a film that can travel lightly, as it says little about the living conditions in Gaza and almost nothing about the Israeli occupation. The occupation is present only so far as it makes armed groups like Hamas become the only option for the people.
The ethics of making films about wars and genocide has been long debated, and now, with the genocide going on in Gaza, what sort of art is legitimate is a point of contention. You can see widely varying views on films like "The Voice of Hind Rajab" (2025), where some people see it as a moment of letting the world take stock of what happened and some others see it as exploitation of a murder. So, in that sense, we can see that the Nasser brothers have tried to stay away from these polemics by shooting a genre film, taking us into the particular world of petty crime and magically holding our gaze for a while, not letting us look at the next street. Films like "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" will never get (performative) standing ovations as they don’t claim to tell the story of "a people" – they choose the tell the stories of small persons.
But the film remains a commentary on how whatever our experience of Gaza is, it is mediated through the camera, and that the person holding the camera always has an agenda, depending on who provides him/her with the resources. So, cleverly, the Nasser brothers turn the focus to the medium of film itself in the second half, to explore the interaction between lived reality and the reality fabricated in the mind of the artist.
