Interview: Arab Nassar – Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Over the course of their three feature films, Gaza-born filmmaker twins Tarzan and Arab Nassar have built a body of cinema rooted in the textures, contradictions, and lived realities of the place that shaped them. Their latest, Once Upon a Time in Gaza, revisits the Gaza of 2007 with a bold mix of crime drama, dark humor, and tragic human detail. The story follows Yahya, a young student who drifts into the orbit of Osama, a falafel-shop owner pushing illicit goods on the side, only to attract the scrutiny of a corrupt policeman whose interference sets off a chain of violence and moral reckoning. It’s a film that is a lot of things – a movie about movie-making, a new Western, a dark comedy filled with gritty realism and stylized imagination. And we can agree with the idea that Arab put forward in this interview: that making this film is in itself a political gesture. The film won a top prize in the Un Certain Regard section this year and fast-forward to November and I had the chance to speak to one half of the brother combo at the 2025 Doha Film Festival. I asked him about how cinema came to him at an early age, his memory about how movies were made in Gaza and my favorite sequence of the film and how it came together when it might have fallen apart.