This summer, Chinese anti-war film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East has dominated the mainland box office. The film implicitly answers the question: what happens when a story about international conflict is told, not through the sights of an assault rifle, but through a gentler lens?
It offers a fundamental restructuring of cinematic narrative paradigms, one that challenges decades of Hollywood inertia. For nearly a century, mainstream international anti-war cinema has been heavily anchored in the Western hero’s crucible. From The Hurt Locker to American Sniper, classic Hollywood conventions have framed global conflict through a distinct lens: military intervention, the combatant’s moral angst or the intervention of a solitary “saviour” imposing order on local chaos.
While these films often critique the horrors of war, they inadvertently reinforce a paternalistic dichotomy – reducing local populations to passive victims who form the backdrop to the agency of foreign soldiers.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East dismantles this formula. Its protagonist, Xu Fu, is neither an elite mercenary nor a geopolitical agent. He is an ordinary Chinese cook earning a living abroad to pay off debt. When war erupts around his small restaurant, he neither picks up a weapon nor delivers lofty ideological speeches. Instead, he simply keeps the cooking stoves lit.
By centring a civilian whose primary act of defiance is feeding people, the film shatters the Western “saviour” archetype. It reframes anti-war drama from a spectacle of military prowess to a quiet testament to human endurance. This shift has ignited a fresh debate about global storytelling: can international cinema move past the binary of conqueror vs victim to build narrative tension around the preservation of daily life?
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