Cannes 2025: Gaza casts shadow over festival, but films celebrate Palestinian resilience
A first national pavilion in years and a pair of films with glowing reviews would normally be cause for celebration in Cannes.
But at the tent housing the Palestine pavilion, a short walk from Cannes' Palais des Festivals, no one has come to the glitzy French Riviera gathering for the revelry.
"We're clearly not here for the Cannes party," says film producer Rashid Abdelhamid, his voice drowned out by the ruckus of a cocktail event at the adjacent American Pavilion.
"But we're doing our own celebrations – of life and resilience," adds the producer of festival hit "One Upon a Time in Gaza", which premiered to rapturous applause earlier this week.
"We want to show that we're here, that we're alive, that we want to live and dance like everyone else," he adds. "And that we're staying where we are."
'Nothing left' of Gaza
Gaza-born twin brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser came up with the idea for "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" well before the start of the ongoing war that has wiped out most of their homeland – and made the title to their film eerily timely.
The movie is set in 2007, the year Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip and Israel began its crippling blockade of the territory. The Nasser brothers describe it as a "brutal turning point" for the overcrowded sliver of land, setting in motion a chain of events that will eventually lead to the "destruction" of Gaza and its people.
The war still raging in Gaza has killed more than 53,000 people, most of them women and children, according to health officials. Israel has vowed to "take full control" of the besieged territory of more than two million inhabitants, where UN agencies have warned of famine after a longstanding blockade was further tightened in March.
The Nasser brothers, who left Gaza in 2011 and shoot their movies in Jordan, describe their latest feature as "archival material" documenting a place that no longer exists.
"Everything one says about Gaza now has to be in the past tense, because there's nothing left of the Gaza we knew," says Arab Nasser. "Israel has destroyed it from north to south. The streets, the trees, the people – it's all gone."
Gazan Rambo
"Once Upon a Time in Gaza", which screened in Cannes' Un Certain Regard segment, follows low-level drug dealer Yahia (Majd Eid) and his flunkey Osama (Nadel Abd Alhay) as they try to make a little extra cash by selling drugs stuffed into falafel sandwiches.
The unassuming Osama dreams of a better life outside the blockaded territory, but wounds up hired by its new Islamist leaders to star as an unlikely Palestinian Rambo in a propaganda TV series.
11:32
As in their previous films, including "Gaza Mon Amour" (2020), the Nasser brothers delve into dramedy and bleak humour to shed light on the plight of their homeland's stricken population. There are no special effects in Gaza, the producer of the B-grade series points out in one scene, "but we do have live bullets".
Tarzan Nasser spoke of the emotional struggle of making the film while war raged back home, each day calling on relatives to see if they were "still alive". But he says dropping the project was never an option.
"It's our duty to tell the story of Gaza," he says. "The genocide of our people is taking place as we speak, and the world is sitting on its hands."
'Finding life in all this death'
This year's festival has opened against a backdrop of mounting outrage at the ongoing war, which began in the wake of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 were killed, most of them civilians, and more than 250 people were taken hostage.
On the eve of the festival, "Schindler's List" actor Ralph Fiennes and Hollywood star Richard Gere were among more than 380 figures to sign an open letter slamming the film industry's silence over "genocide" in Gaza. The letter, published by Libération and Variety, decried the killing of photojournalist Fatma Hassona, whose efforts to document the destruction of Gaza are the subject of a documentary screened in Cannes.
The festival's jury president Juliette Binoche also played tribute to Hassona during the opening ceremony, reading excerpts from a poem by the 25-year-old Gazan, who was killed by an Israeli missile strike on her home the day after the film was selected for Cannes' ACID sidebar.
As filmmaker Sepideh Farsi shows in her documentary "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk", which has drawn huge crowds in Cannes, Hassona did more than simply document the war. Hers was an act of resistance, a dogged determination, as she put it, to "find some life in all this death".
The exiled Iranian filmmaker has lamented a collective failure to confront and sanction Israel's far-right government over the ongoing war and its stated aim to expel Gaza's population.
"Just like there was no justification for what happened on October 7, nothing can justify what is happening in Gaza," Farsi told FRANCE 24 on the eve of the festival. "We cannot just stand by and let the massacre go on."
'Reclaim our narratives'
Hassona's photographs documenting the war in Gaza are exhibited at three different venues in Cannes, including at the pavilion run by the Palestine Film Institute (PFI), an independent body that supports films by and about Palestinians.
A founding member of the PFI, Abdelhamid, says he is not surprised it has taken so long for film stars to speak out against the war. Since the October 7 attacks, he adds, "many people have kept quiet, fearing for their jobs".
The producer of "Once Upon a Time in Gaza" says he struggled to finance the film in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks as several partners, including some Arab countries, withdrew the funds they had pledged.
"Financing a Palestinian movie is never easy," he says. "After October 7 it got even harder."
The Palestinian Pavilion in Cannes is only the second in the festival's history and the first since 2018. At roundtables in Cannes, PFI representatives have urged the festival and key decision-makers in the industry to help amplify the voice of Palestinian filmmakers and stories.
The institute, which relies on support from foreign donors, is backing a slate of documentary projects at the Cannes Film Market, which runs parallel with the festival. The films talk about children scraping a living in Gaza, shepherds confronting settler expansion in the West Bank, and young actresses pursuing their artistic aspirations.
Abdelhamid says cinema has a critical role to play in countering misrepresentations of the Mideast conflict and the Palestinian people.
"We need to reclaim our narratives to show that Palestinians have not always been refugees living in tents," he says. "We have nightclubs and bars in Palestine, and young people with TikTok accounts, just like everywhere else."
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