Palestinian story needs platform, says director of Gazan film at Cannes

CANNES, France — The decision to include a film set in Gaza in the Cannes Film Festival’s official selection comes at a particularly urgent time for the small coastal enclave, twin Palestinian filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser say.

“There is a need to give a platform to the voice of Palestine, the Palestinian story, the Gaza story, in an international festival like the Cannes Film Festival, with a wide audience from all over the world,” Arab Nasser tells Reuters.

The brothers’ film “Once Upon A Time in Gaza,” which is competing in the second-tier Un Certain Regard category, premiered at the festival in southern France on Monday.

Their previous work includes “Condom Lead,” the first-ever Palestinian short to compete at Cannes in 2013, as well as their 2015 debut feature “Degrade” and 2020’s “Gaza Mon Amour.”

“Once Upon A Time in Gaza” begins in 2007, the year the Hamas terror group violently took over Gaza, with low-level drug dealer Osama (Majd Eid) running a falafel stand that serves as a front.

His underling Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay) looks after the restaurant and pines for a better life outside Gaza.

After an incident with a corrupt cop, the story fast-forwards to 2009, when Hamas has fully taken control, and Yahya is cast in a cheap-looking TV series commissioned by the group about a terrorist who died a hero in the fight against Israel.

Yahya is meant to symbolize a whole generation of Gazans who have been stuck in the coastal enclave with few perspectives, said Tarzan Nasser.

“Maybe his lot would have changed had Israel allowed him to leave the Gaza Strip,” says the director, who, along with his brother, has been in exile in Jordan for more than a decade.

The film’s name is meant to capture the rhythm of Gaza at the time, where there is no stability or continuity, and “an incident now would become a ‘once upon a time’ tomorrow,” Arab Nasser says.

But it has a different meaning with a view to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel, saw 251 taken hostage, and triggered the ongoing war.

Now, “we refer to all of Gaza as ‘once upon a time,’ because Israel destroyed Gaza from north to south and has damaged all means of life,” he adds.

“All the memories, all the incidents that one has in one’s memory of this place, have all vanished; Israel has destroyed it completely.”