‘Once Upon a Time in Gaza’ movie review: A Fistful of Falasteen in Gazawood

For filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser, twin brothers born and raised in Gaza City before relocating to Jordan in 2012, cinema has provided a means of documenting a reality that much of the world imagines only through the latest updates in death tolls . Their previous features, Dégradé (2015) and Gaza Mon Amour (2020), approached life inside the Palestinian enclave through sharply observed personal stories. And with their latest Once Upon a Time in Gaza , which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and won the section’s Best Director prize, the brothers expand that project into something considerably more self-reflexive, using the story of a low-budget resistance film to interrogate who gets to create and control images of Palestine.