Yesterday, Friday, November 14, as part of the Gala section of the 46th Cairo International Film Festival, Once Upon a Time in Gaza, directed by Tarzan and Arab Nasser, makes its Middle East and North African premiere on the Main Stage of the Cairo Opera House.
The film, co-written by the Nasser brothers alongside Amer Nasser and Marie Legrand, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Director Award in the Un Certain Regard competition.
Set in Gaza in 2007, the film follows Yehya, a young university student who forms an unlikely friendship with Osama, a charismatic restaurant owner with a generous heart.
Together, they begin selling drugs while delivering falafel sandwiches—a comic setup that quickly spirals into a confrontation with a corrupt police officer whose inflated ego dominates the city’s underworld.
While presented as a crime comedy, Once Upon a Time in Gaza uses humor and satire to explore deeper political and social realities.
It offers a fresh perspective on everyday life in Gaza, portraying its people not as distant symbols of conflict but as human beings navigating the weight of Israeli occupation, violations, blockade, and the severe restrictions that shape daily survival.
The title Once Upon a Time in Gaza draws on more than just the tradition of classic “Once Upon a Time” films.
It also echoes the storytelling rhythms of children’s folktales—an intentional contrast that sets up the film’s blend of innocence and brutality, fantasy and harsh reality.
By invoking the language of fairytales, the Nasser brothers underline the surreal, almost mythical absurdity of life in Gaza, where events often feel too extreme, ironic, or tragic to be real.
The film is rich with dark humor and biting satire, using Yehya’s journey as a mirror of Gaza’s fractured identity.
His accidental rise—from shy student to quiet falafel seller, to an assistant in Osama’s drug trade, to an actor playing a revolutionary hero—reflects the impossibility of holding onto a stable sense of self in a place defined by conflict and constraint.
After Osama’s death, Yehya slips into moments of deep self-questioning: Who is he? What is his purpose? Why does he keep becoming someone else by accident? His contradictions capture the unstable, often absurd conditions of life in Gaza, where fate, coincidence, and chaos constantly collide.
Opposite Yehya stands the police officer—celebrated publicly as Gaza’s leading anti-drug enforcer, yet privately orchestrating the very operations he claims to fight.
His violence, hypocrisy, and eventual death at the hands of Yehya (in the same spot where he murdered Osama) create a powerful narrative circle that exposes the cycles of corruption dominating Gaza’s social landscape.
One of the film’s most playful elements is its “film-within-a-film” device: chaotic, humorous scenes showing the crew trying—often failing—to make a heroic revolutionary movie within Gaza’s restrictions.
Through this meta-cinematic lens, the Nasser brothers deliver a satirical critique of artistic production under siege, highlighting the near impossibility of filmmaking in such a suffocating environment.
This is not the Nasser brothers’ first exploration of Gaza through an unconventional lens.
Their acclaimed Gaza Mon Amour approached the city through intimacy and gentle humor.
Once Upon a Time in Gaza, while sharper and more politically pointed, retains their signature focus on human depth, irony, and resilience.
With its fusion of dark comedy, political critique, and inventive storytelling, “Once Upon a Time in Gaza” stands as one of the most compelling cinematic portrayals of life under blockade.
Anchored by clever narrative layers and a title that bridges epic film tradition with the simplicity of children’s folktales, it shows Gaza through a lens of humanity, contradiction, and poetic absurdity.
Rather than relying on familiar tropes, the film paints a portrait of a place where survival itself becomes an act of resistance—and where stories, even the absurd ones, continue to demand to be told.
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