Muslim International Film Festival 2026: Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Once upon a time in Gaza there were doctors with book-lined offices. There were well-stocked pharmacies in every neighbourhood and a plentiful supply of chick peas and parsley. It was therefore not impossible to run a small-time drug dealing business with a falafel restaurant as a front.

This is how Osama makes his living . It’s 2007, and Hamas have just taken control. Not that it interferes with business , except that the funeral of a militant snarls up the traffic. Osama (Majd Eid) is a central-casting hard-boiled crook, the sort who drives a hard bargain and stubs his cigarette out in your lunch. He has a loyal side kick, Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), a sensitive soul not really suited to a life of crime. (When a pharmacist asks why he’s collecting a generous prescription of powerful painkillers he mentally gropes for an excuse, eventually settling, without conviction , on “hernia?”) Halfway through the film, Osama gets taken out in a cold-blooded killing, witnessed, from hiding, by Yahya. Time passes. In a truly Hollywood-ish contrivance , Yahya gets recruited, by the Ministry of Culture no less, to star in a propaganda movie. His personality is the opposite of heroic but his face is right. This film-within-a film has no budget for props; the government are lending them real weapons and real ammunition. Chekhov and guns spring to mind. Learning on the job, Yahya seeks revenge for his beloved friend and mentor.

Eid makes Osama appealing from the start, with his soulful St Bernard eyes, even as he’s obviously lying to the doctor. He’s a decent crook who won’t grass on his mates. He even has a delightful musical comedy moment, where he dances happily alone, surrounded by fairy lights, to music from the television. Things go a bit downhill for him after that. Alhay’s Yahya is the sort of character things just happen to. When he does find the courage to act,  however,  he is quite inventively murderous. The film makers, the sceptical minister /producer and the bespectacled director are like characters from a comic strip. With Amine Bouhafa’s upbeat music and the photogenic food – Osama sells  beautiful pillowy pita – Once Upon a Time in Gaza is a lot of fun to watch, and subtle in its apparent lack of subtlety.

There are numerous harrowing films about both sides in the conflict. Here the troubled situation is just background. We do see Yahya being arbitrarily  refused permission to attend his sister’s wedding over the border, but bureaucratic cruelty  is not the point of the story.  The villain, in the ‘real life ‘ part of the story  is not an Israeli but a corrupt local police officer , played by Ramzi Maqdisi, suave and square jawed  like  Scar in The  Lion King. The government film obviously portrays Israeli soldiers as brutish thugs, but they’re using local actors who  are comically unenthusiastic. The budget only runs to a khaki van with a  Star of David painted on it, and they grumble about having to schlep that blue and white flag everywhere. During  one session an actor gets too much into his role and knocks a child down , unluckily with his father watching. They retake.”Just grab his jacket or something,” advises the director.

Referencing Hollywood fantasy with its very title,  the film opens  with President Trump’s grandiose imagining of a Gazan  Riviera and ends with a wildly ridiculous accident, a version something that really did happen once upon a time in Hollywood. Just as David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, supposedly said a country isn’t a proper country until it has its own thieves – this film offers a fantasy of Gaza as a sunny place  with a few good criminals and the occasional bent copper.