A Chinese cook in the Middle East serves up a very different anti-war film

Jianlu Bi is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at the Charhar Institute in Beijing.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.