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Twin Gazan filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser said they never thought the title of their new film Once Upon a Time in Gaza would have such heartbreaking resonance.

“Right now there is nothing left of Gaza,” Tarzan said when it premiered Monday at the Cannes film festival.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel’s offensive in Gaza has ravaged large swathes of the Palestinian territory and killed tens of thousands of people.

Israel has vowed to “take control of all” the besieged territory of more than two million inhabitants, where United Nations agencies have warned of famine following Israel’s implementation of a two-month total blockade.

Aid started to trickle into the Gaza Strip on Monday, following widespread condemnation of the siege.

The Nasser brothers, who left Gaza in 2012, said their new film set in 2007, when Hamas Islamists seized control of the strip, explains the lead-up to today’s catastrophic war.

Once Upon A Time In Gaza, which screened in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section, follows friends Yahia and Osama as they try to make a little extra cash by selling drugs stuffed into falafel sandwiches.

Using a manual meat grinder that does not rely on rare electricity, student Yahia blends up fava beans and fresh herbs to make the patty-shaped fritters in the back of Osama’s small run-down eatery, while dreaming of being able to leave the Israeli-blockaded coastal strip.

Charismatic hustler Osama, meanwhile, visits pharmacy after pharmacy to amass as many pills as he can with stolen prescriptions, pursued by a corrupt cop.

‘Human beings’

Israel first imposed a blockade on Gaza in June 2006 after one of its soldiers was taken hostage, and reinforced it in September 2007, several months after Hamas took power.

“The blockade was gradually tightened, tightened until reaching the genocide we see today,” Tarzan said.

“Until today they are counting the calories that enter,” he added.

An Israeli NGO said in 2012 that documents showed Israeli authorities had calculated that 2,279 calories per person per day was deemed sufficient to prevent malnutrition in Gaza.

The defence ministry, however, claimed it had “never counted calories” when allowing aid in.

Despite all this, Gazans have always shown a love of life and been incredibly resilient, the directors said.

“My father is until now in northern Gaza,” Tarzan said, adding that the family’s two homes had been destroyed.

But before then, “every time a missile hit, damaging a wall or window, he’d fix it up the next day”, he said.

In films, “the last thing I want to do is talk about Israel and what it’s doing”, he added.

“Human beings are more important — who they are, how they’re living and adapting to this really tough reality.”

“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 told Reuters on Tuesday.

In their previous films, the Nasser twins followed an elderly fisherman enamoured with his neighbour in the market in Gaza Mon Amour and filmed women trapped at a hairdresser’s in Degrade from 2015.

Like Once Upon a Time in Gaza, they were all shot in Jordan.

‘Gaza was a riviera’

In Gaza, “we don’t have special effects but we do have live bullets”, the producer says in one scene.

Once Upon a Time in Gaza has received good reviews, with Screen Daily saying the “taut, succinct film should win widespread attention”.

Arab said that long before Gazan tap water became salty and US President Donald Trump sparked controversy by saying he wanted to turn their land into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, the coastal strip was a happy place.

“I remember when I was little, Gaza actually was a riviera. It was the most beautiful place. I can still taste the fresh water on my tongue,” he said.

“Now Trump comes up with this great invention that he wants to turn it into a riviera, after Israel completely destroyed it?”

Israel’s offensive has killed 53,486 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health authorities, whose figures the United Nations deems reliable.

Gaza health authorities said at least 44 people were killed there in the early hours of Tuesday.