Once Upon a Time in Gaza – first-look review

As of 2007, the Lev­an­tine nation of Pales­tine had already been under Israeli occu­pa­tion for exact­ly forty years. This pre­cise era is where twin Gazan direc­tors, Arab and Tarzan Nass­er, opt to trans­port us to for their lat­est cin­e­mat­ic homage to their unlaw­ful­ly besieged home, Once Upon A Time In Gaza. As with their pre­vi­ous for­ays into film­mak­ing, the broth­ers shot the film in Jor­dan, a neigh­bour­ing coun­try and state of refuge for many dis­placed Pales­tini­ans, includ­ing the direc­tors who fled Gaza in 2012. This removal from the strip is for the sake of safe­ty, but also has the effect of evok­ing a ver­sion of the city that was in no way per­fect, but now fails to exist entire­ly. The tan­gi­ble long­ing and affec­tion for their moth­er­land serve as a reminder that the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple will con­tin­ue to per­sist and fight for their liberation.

Osama (Majd Eid) owns a seem­ing­ly incon­se­quen­tial falafel shop, which fre­quent­ly oper­ates under the super­vi­sion of his only employ­ee, Yahya (Nad­er Abd Alhay). The fun-sized restau­rant serves up fluffy stuffed pita breads on fresh­ly torn sheets of news­pa­per, inked with head­lines detail­ing the rad­i­cal resis­tance move­ment Hamas’s rise to pow­er, a retal­ia­to­ry result of the grotesque Israeli occupation.

How­ev­er, falafel isn’t their only offer­ing. Despite his hes­i­ta­tion, Yahya fol­lows instruc­tions to tuck alu­mini­um tabs of crim­son red pills, which Osama sources through forged pre­scrip­tions and phar­ma­cy crawls, under­neath the deep-fried snacks in a select few sand­wich­es, until a run-in with Abou Simi (Ramzi Maq­disi), a cor­rupt high-rank­ing police offi­cer in the nar­cotics divi­sion, has fatal repercussions.

Two years lat­er, Yahya remains haunt­ed by the mur­der of his only com­pan­ion and leads a soli­tary exis­tence, until he is scout­ed by a direc­tor (Issaq Elias) poised to cre­ate an 80s-esque hyper­styl­ized action flick turned pro­pa­gan­da project titled The Rebel. Yahya is an unas­sum­ing choice to play the tit­u­lar rebel and quick­ly becomes a sym­bol of the rev­o­lu­tion. He’s painful­ly shy and has lit­tle assertive­ness, but his lack of self-assur­ance makes him a per­fect­ly mold­able fig­ure to be the Min­istry of Culture’s mouthpiece.

At times, the bal­ance of the­atri­cal­i­ty and dark com­e­dy in Once Upon A Time In Gaza becomes rem­i­nis­cent of a medi­um known across the MENA region as Musal­salat – soap operas (most com­mon­ly pro­duced in Egypt) that tack­le social and polit­i­cal com­men­tary, which air night­ly through­out the month of Ramadan. The melo­dra­ma derives from rich cul­tur­al speci­fici­ty that lends itself well to this tale of love, loss, and unrest.

The film is divid­ed into these two sol­id chap­ters, but they don’t quite click togeth­er to become a sin­gu­lar cohe­sive piece. Nev­er­the­less, the cre­ative swings tak­en by the Nass­er Broth­ers to craft some­thing that breaks free from the country’s gloomy mod­ern sub­text and explores a real­i­ty beyond the ongo­ing geno­cide are some­thing to be gen­uine­ly admired.

That’s not to say that it evades dis­cussing the decades of suf­fer­ing which Pales­tini­ans have been sub­ject­ed to. Still, it finds ways to weave webs of sub­text, rather than becom­ing a super­cut of fetishized tragedy intend­ed for West­ern con­sump­tion. Despite the seem­ing­ly nev­er-end­ing cycle of dev­as­ta­tion and rev­o­lu­tion, the Nass­er Broth­ers refuse to let their resilience and opti­mism for the future slip, con­clud­ing with the hope­ful mes­sage that one day it will end.

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