'Once Upon a Time in Gaza’ REVIEW: The Performance of Violence
'Once Upon a Time in Gaza’ REVIEW: The Performance of Violence
Nader Abd Alhay as Yahya in Once Upon a Time in Gaza / Photo courtesy of Les Films du Tambour, Made in Palestine Project, Red Balloon Films, Rise Studios, Riva Filmproduktion, and Ukbar Filmes
This review contains spoilers.
When a film starts with the US’ fascist leader Donald Trump saying incredibly vile promises of turning Gaza into a riviera for his own selfish agendas, it sets the subtextually looming oppression of Once Upon a Time in Gaza in motion.
While it does have some stumbles in terms of how it structured and paced itself, the story that the Nassar Brother does tell with Once Upon a Time in Gaza is one that deftly navigates both genre and filmic metanarratives. All to explore the performance of violence itself in action films as reflexive of revenge and retribution against all oppressive systems, both within and beyond Palestine.
Majd Eid as Osama and Nader Abd Alhay as Yahya in Once Upon a Time in Gaza / Photo courtesy of Les Films du Tambour, Made in Palestine Project, Red Balloon Films, Rise Studios, Riva Filmproduktion, and Ukbar Filmes
Set in the Gaza Strip during 2007, the film already opens with Hamas marching through the streets with a martyr’s body on their shoulders as they officially take over Palestine. But suddenly, an intercut shows up to an 80s-style trailer for a Gazan action film, The Rebel, already establishing an immediate connection of fictional violence to real-life violence. From there however, the film’s major chunk mainly focuses on the lives of two criminal friends: underground narcotics dealer Ossama (Majd Eid) and his younger protege Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay).
It shows this vast network of a falafel store as a front, underhanded deals, and forging doctor’s notes; however, the tonal direction for these actions are surprisingly presented as mundane. It’s as if Ossama’s drug rackets are just like any ordinary living one does to make a living; all of this while the state-sanctioned violence of the IDF are at best an incidental subtext that everyone is numbly normalized to. The explosions are faintly heard, the flashing lights of missiles are background noise, and even the news reports on TV feel ironically distant despite being on the literal ground zero of a genocide.
While the pacing of these sequences are admittedly more sluggish than I would prefer, there’s a recognition of an intent of such mundanity as deliberately showing the necessity of merely existing as a resistance to the violence. There’s even a recurring motif of the falafels being sold in newspaper wrappers with reports about Netenhayu continuing the ongoing genocide. Every normal conversation, grift, or time spent just going about life in their falafel store is just a visual reminder of a people existing as people, flaws and all.
Nader Abd Alhay as Yahya in Once Upon a Time in Gaza / Photo courtesy of Les Films du Tambour, Made in Palestine Project, Red Balloon Films, Rise Studios, Riva Filmproduktion, and Ukbar Filmes
However, even with the outside forces of the Israeli colonial state, there’s also an internal threat to ordinary Gazans there with the paramilitary arm of Hamas. Personifying such oppression is narcotics officer Abou Sami (Ramzi Maqdisi), who arrests Ossama in the middle of a deal. With the fact that they have an implied friendship in the past, Abou offers Ossama two choices: either he rats out his old wartime friends from his time at the Intifada (Arabic word for uprising), or gets killed. But with Ossama being the expert conman he is, takes the first option to go free but refuses to actually rat out his friends out of principle. So, Abou Sami promptly goes to Ossama’s store to ambush him into silence; he eventually shoots Ossama dead, with a noticeably tearful expression of regret on Abou’s head.
Unfortunately on that same night of his murder, Yahya was actually there hiding underneath the store’s cabinet. He witnessed the murder of the mentor that helped him, and even encouraged him to eventually leave the criminal life. Now all he can eventually do is salivate in revenge against the villain that killed his friend.
Ramzi Maqdisi as Abou Sami in Once Upon a Time in Gaza / Photo courtesy of Les Films du Tambour, Made in Palestine Project, Red Balloon Films, Rise Studios, Riva Filmproduktion, and Ukbar Filmes
Two years later is where the true meat of the film starts as we see a grief-stricken Yahya trying to go on with his life. But in a fateful surprise he gets approached by the director from the Gazan Ministry of Culture to be in the aforementioned action film, The Rebel. Due to his near-likeness to the martyred military leader of Hamas, he gets immediately casted in the lead role in spite of any lack of acting experience. Yahya accepts immediately, both as a source of living but also because the production itself actually uses real guns as their props. Eventually, Yahya even encounters Abou Sami (now a much more powerful cop) amongst the meetings with officials, and starts his plan for vengeance.
In all honesty, the most substantially compelling parts of this film comes in these sequences where it intersperses Yahya’s shift from a meek and quiet nobody to transforming himself into a vigilante via the power of performance. Due to his own proximity to the role of being a military leader and hero, he eventually embodies the leader’s same desire for retaliation against the oppressive IDF to his own personal payback against a threat much closer to home. There is a ton of play with reality and fiction where Palestinians are performing as IDF soldiers or Yahya’s revenge against Abou Sami as another threat to his own existence and desire for peace.
A brief incident where the IDF actors push around a kid actor became too real for a parent there, due to the fact that there’s an intentional blurring of lines between what’s real violence or not. The fact that this scene follows it up with a tilt up to a fighter jet crossing the Gaza strip only punctuates that muddling of the lines. This is where the film truly won me over with its use of a film-within-a-film framing device as a satirical sore point of how oppressive colonialism is continually perpetuated: it is through the continued cycle of both violent images that beget violent actions. So when there’s a revenge story on top of such contexts like that, it becomes very clear that the film has a clear statement on using a story like this to call for all violence. Not in a liberalist way of a “both sides bad” approach, but in a more nuanced navigation of needing to fight against all oppressive enemies to truly free Palestine from the centuries of continual death.
Nader Abd Alhay as Yahya in Once Upon a Time in Gaza / Photo courtesy of Les Films du Tambour, Made in Palestine Project, Red Balloon Films, Rise Studios, Riva Filmproduktion, and Ukbar Filmes
It’s just mostly unfortunate that the ending didn't completely click with me, even with such profound attempts to add a period to that statement on violent cycles. Once Upon a Time in Gaza sadly rushes its ending in a sloppily fast paced finale where Yahya was able to easily disarm and torture Abou Sami to death in the very same falafel store where Ossama was killed. We then get a quick flashback of a younger Yahya that got rejected to move out the Gaza Strip, and meet Ossama for the first time in an emotional show of what life had taken away from Yahya.
If there was a major restructuring of the story where we start with Yahya being approached to the movie, then editing the film to be a series of flashbacks of what his life was prior, before then having all these threads of his life piece together to who he is today, the ending and its ideas would’ve resonated way harder. This flawed structuring of the story is what makes the final scene truly underwhelming from what it built up.
It’s a production shoot for a home invasion scene where the IDF performers shoot up a house where a stray bullet ricochets into Yahya’s head, killing him instantly. The one part that kind of saves such a disappointing ending was the fact that it actually cuts to the same opening shot of Hamas on the street walking and carrying Yahya’s corpse instead.
What a brilliantly dark callback to really emphasize the neverending cycle that Gazans have to go through to merely exist. The title card then flashes the words, “It will end.” Not the usual “The End” cards, but a hopeful call to action to end the genocide that happens before and right now. The only thing to add to that isn’t just a hopeful plea, it has to be an urgent demand: It should end.
‘Once Upon a Time in Gaza’ is part of the 2025 QCinema International FIlm Festival lineup.
