Rome Film Festival 2025: Once Upon a Time in Gaza (dirs. Arab & Tarzan Nasser) | Review
In Once Upon a Time in Gaza, the Nasser brothers return to their homeland with a bold blend of realism and satire that captures the darkly absurd pulse of life under siege.
Directed by Arab and Tarzan Nasser, Once Upon a Time in Gaza premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2025, where it won the Best Director award. Following their previous films Dégradé and Gaza Mon Amour, the filmmaking brothers return now with another story rooted in their homeland — this time set in 2007 Gaza (filmed in Jordan), at the moment Hamas seized control and in which Israel imposed an indefinite blockade on the Gaza Strip.
Mixing realism and satire, the film follows Osama (Majd Eid), a larger than life character who runs a small falafel stand, and his younger, quieter assistant Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay). Behind the counter, they also deal painkillers on the side — an act of rebellion and survival in a city tightening under ever more extreme pressure.
After a violent encounter with a corrupt policeman (Ramzi Maqdisi), the story jumps two years ahead, when Yahya is cast by a local director to play a militant in a state-funded action film. The movie within a movie becomes both absurd and revealing — a portrait of a place where the line between fiction and reality, resistance and performance, has long been blurred.
The Nasser brothers are filmmakers who understand the rhythm and absurdity of life under occupation, and there are moments here that feel genuinely alive — darkly funny, human, and full of the contradictions of Gaza. The cinematography, by Christophe Graillot, captures a land filled with smoke and smoke, with lively streets and tender gestures.
But while the film’s ideas are fascinating, its political relevance unbelievably important, its structure never quite lands. The two halves — one a revenge story, the other a satire about art and propaganda — don’t cohere into a satisfying whole, and the ending arrives abruptly, without the emotional payoff it seems to be building toward. I was genuinely surprised when the film ended, as it never felt it had quite begun.
Still, the performances are strong, particularly from Nader Abd Alhay, whose emotionally restrained presence carries some of the film’s best scenes. And there is an undeniable power in the Nassers’ continuing to centre cinema on Gaza — not always as an image of perpetual tragedy, but as a living, breathing, complex place filled with real people, not just statistics. Even if Once Upon a Time in Gaza doesn’t fully come together, it remains a unique and important film — striking, ambitious, and full of tenderness towards a land under occupation.
