Famous for their 2020 film Gaza Mon Amour, the Nasser brothers return in 2025 with Once Upon a Time in Gaza, premiering in Australia at the Melbourne International Film Festival after a Best Direction nomination at Cannes.
The twin directors, working under professional pseudonyms Tarzan and Arab, were born in Gaza in 1988 just a year after the strip’s last cinemas.
Their work carves out a space for Palestinian stories on the international stage, recording an international box office gross of more than $140,000.
With cinemas destroyed and leisure options further erased by war, blockade and Hamas’s strict cultural controls, the Nasser brothers' ability to bring Palestinian stories to the global stage is critical.
Blending comedy and action, the film feels especially urgent in today’s political climate, offering a timely, poignant look at life under the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The title nods to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but its dark humour satirically explores “Gazawood”: a cinema for a people so often displaced, silenced and denied both land and space for art.
It brings Palestinian voices and stories to Western audiences, centring on Yahya, played by Nader Abd Alhay, who while dealing with grief and hardship finds himself on a film set.
The story follows Yahya, a young man cast as a national symbol in Gaza’s so-called “first action movie” after tragedy reshapes his life.
Yet beneath the genre trappings lies a meditation on what it means to tell stories under siege.
The Nassers draw on traditions from Hollywood blockbusters to Arab popular cinema, framed through the stark reality of Palestinian life.
The filmmaking is shaped by three realities: the conflict depicted between Israel and Palestine on screen, the unrest unfolding outside the set in the city, and the awareness carried by us, the viewers, of the ongoing war in Gaza.
The script shifts between deadpan humour and tragic fatalism, subverting the escapism comedy usually promises.
Dialogue often calls attention to its own artifice: in one scene, a Hamas officer says to Yahya, “Do you think we are in a film?” moments before being shot by the protagonist, reminding both characters and audience that this story is rooted in reality, a gun is a weapon not just a film prop.
In another, the camera pans upward from a staged action sequence between the characters to reveal a military plane overhead, a brutal reminder that fiction in Gaza is never far from war.
Visually, the muted, dusty palette of reds and browns evokes both the harsh landscape and the characters’ emotional terrain, while also leaving the viewer with a lingering, thought-provoking reflection on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The editing jars the viewer, by cutting between the exaggerated mock-action set pieces and the stillness of documentary-like observation of Gaza.
Kitsch old-cinema sound effects punctuate the action. They are at once playful and unsettling, distinguishing filmmaking from reality, despite the violence it depicts being all too real.
The Nasser brothers blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, questioning how cinema can reflect, distort and resist lived experience.
Once Upon a Time in Gaza is not simply Gaza’s "first action movie"; it is a film about what it means to make movies at all when reality is saturated with violence.
It confronts the dis-reality of the media, our tendency to consume suffering as spectacle, while never allowing the weight of occupation to fade from view.
By the end, one question lingers: Is cinema a means of escape, or does it only reveal how inescapable reality really is?
