THE STORY – As Hamas tightens control over Gaza, Yahia seeks vengeance for his friend Ossama’s brutal murder. His encounter with the killer alters everything.
THE CAST – Nader Abd Alhaym, Majd Eid & Is’haq Elias
THE TEAM – Tarzan Nasser & Arab Nasser (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 87 Minutes
Watching films in one of the hubs of the world’s super-rich can often feel incredibly incongruous. The Cannes Film Festival occurs amidst high-end boutiques on the Côte d’Azur, a Faberge egg’s throw from Monte Carlo. Here, we mass to watch films that connect us with some of the more desperate places on Earth. This Cannes has seen films from the war zone of Ukraine and by filmmakers from Iran and China, who risk censorship or worse. The most extreme, of course, is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and two films are screening that have a direct connection to Gaza. However, the one with Gaza in the title actually relates only obliquely to the ongoing situation. Arab and Tarzan Nasser – credited as the Nasser Brothers – follow up their films “Dégradé” (2015) and “Gaza Mon Amour” (2020) with a noirish crime story that has traces of Quentin Tarantino, Nicholas Winding Refn, and the Safdi Brothers.
Context is first provided by the now infamous quote of Donald Trump spit-balling ethnic cleansing and creating a new piece of Mediterranean real estate for prospective speculators who don’t mind removing munitions and human remains. It’s an immediate misdirection as the film begins with Gaza City in 2007, a place that is not the cratered moonscape it now resembles. Here, in fact, it is a lively place full of businesses and life and, as with any city, has its share of wheelers and dealers. One such is Osama (Majd Eid), who owns a falafel fast food joint and has a handy sideline in drug dealing, stealing prescriptions when he can.
In this, he is assisted none too happily by Yahya, played with laconic grace by Nader Abd Alhay, who would prefer to continue his legal duties in the restaurant or, better still, get out of Gaza for a more hopeful future. The situation turns nasty when a corrupt policeman, Abou Sami, played with an avuncular malignancy by Ramzi Maqdisi, arrests Osama and tries to pressure him into snitching.
Something’s got to give, and so it does. Fast forward to 2009, and Hamas has now taken control of Gaza. Now they are in charge, they are also trying to consolidate their power with a program of propaganda, one element of which is a TV show based on the life of a Hamas “martyr” whose funeral we saw at the beginning of the film. The film director (Is’haq Elias) casts a traumatized Yahya in the role when he spots him in a crowd and sees that he bears a striking resemblance to the subject of the film.
Filmmaking allows for comedy as the movie apes Hollywood action films like Rambo, suggesting that despite being at ideological loggerheads, the soft power of Sylvester Stallone and his ilk is inescapable for the time being. It’s also a sly reference to the filmmaking of the Nasser Brothers, which is so obviously indebted to American filmmakers rather than Mena confreres. Crowds mistake the filming for real events and intervene to protect the children apparently being harassed by “IDF” soldiers.
With his new visibility, Yahya finds himself once more in the sights of Officer Sami, who, having gained a promotion, visits the set one day. The persistence of conflict and the yearning for revenge could be seen as a larger analogy, but I doubt we need to go there. The film’s setting is enough to evoke all sorts of thoughts. Occasionally, an excerpt from a news report or politician’s speech will provide us with context. Or a missile or drone strike will hit and demolish a building in what looks like much more contemporary footage as if the present day is flying in to smash to smithereens the comparably mild pretensions of low-ranking criminals and corrupt law enforcement. The life of a city is also this: the drug dealers and the shoplifters, the beggars and the slightly mad. The occasional act of random violence in a city might be terrible for the individuals involved. Still, it pales into utter insignificance when compared to the annihilation being perpetrated right now.
In this sense, a film as modest in its ambitions as “Once Upon a Time in Gaza” is actually an act of political resistance in striving to depict a normal Gaza that no longer exists and may never exist again. It has become a historical record of a lost city, as irretrievable as Atlantis, but this is an Atlantis that was purposefully and deliberately sunk. On a technical level, the film is excellent. The brother’s regular DoP, Christophe Graillot, shoots with an evocative sense of place and the nighttime that mostly surrounds his characters. There are some shots that reminded me of John Cassavettes’s “Killing of a Chinese Bookie.” Amine Bouhafa provides a score that channels both Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, with sad Godfathery trumpets overlaying the two funeral scenes that bookend the film.
It would be good to see the Nasser Brothers breaking away from their influences and stamping their own vision on their films. However, the genre has always provided artists with a way of addressing the political present, and this is a well-made and thoroughly entertaining thriller/dramedy that evokes a lost Palestinian city that has been destroyed before our eyes. Seeing the shiftier citizens is a necessary humanization of a population that has been buried under the rubble of new footage and actual rubble.
