Given the horrific and continuing circumstances of the Gaza tragedy of the past year-and-a-half, the narrative dimensions of the moving film The Teacher — essentially completed and premiered in 2023 — suggests a strange period piece–like patina. Inspired British-Palestinian writer-director-producer Farah Nabulsi‘s tale of a teacher drawn into underground resistance, the film takes place in a “calmer” time, during Palestine’s apartheid-like occupation, versus the ostensibly genocidal Gazan atrocity of the present day.
Even so, Nabulsi connects the historical/contemporary dots by adding a brief coda to the film in its current form — a fleeting TV newscast report of the early days, and early death toll, of Israel’s post–October 7th Operation Protective Edge campaign. The film’s broader U.S. release phase brings the film to Santa Barbara this weekend, including an SBIFF Cinema Society screening and Q&A with the director — Oscar-nominated for her earlier short film The Present — on Sunday morning (April 20 at 11 a.m.) at the Riviera Theatre. Click here for details.
In the case of this film, it is helpful to understand the background of the storyteller. Nabulsi is a “reformed stockbroker” from London, drawn into making cinema that matters after a roots rediscovery trip to Palestine in 2013. Her consciousness was awakened to the need to tell a larger story about this conflicted nation and region.
In The Teacher, Nabulsi’s tale revolves around the tangle of ghosts and more urgent matters in a Palestinian village, where our schoolteacher protagonist Brasem (Saleh Bakri) takes his promising student Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) under his wing and a visiting British volunteer Lisa (Imogen Poots) into his world and, ultimately, embrace. Various conflicted plotlines converge, including the destructive and homicidal aggressions of Israeli settlers in the village, slowly emerging details about Brasem’s own personal causes of anti-Israeli anger, and the desperation of an older American couple seeking their kidnapped son, now an Israeli soldier held captive for a prisoner swap plan.
Despite the sympathetic favoring of Palestinian plights, the film isn’t just one-dimensional in its portrayal of the complex Israeli-Palestinian juggernaut, especially in the paralleling of fathers on both sides, whose sons were caught in the crosshairs of conflict. An Israeli lawyer, known for championing Palestinian cases against Israeli criminality, takes on the case of a brother’s brazen murder by a settler, although she knows the case will likely go nowhere.
At times, the film leans towards melodrama, but it mostly skillfully propels us forward and deeper into this specific plot maze and the larger socio-political quagmire. Acting is generally strong, with a few weak spots, and Alex Baranowski’s cello-enriched musical score impressively informs the drama without overbearing it.
The Teacher’s main virtue, beyond filmic considerations, has to do with its all-too rare and valuable insights on the humanity — and inhumanity — of life in Palestine. Nabulsi gives us an empathetic, storyteller’s perspective of on-the-ground and in-the-flesh view, versus the distorting lens of media sound bites, Palestinians as props/abstractions and statistics.
In one well-placed irony baked into the story, the startling narrative turning point of arson and murder in an olive orchard plays starkly against the setting’s symbolic portent: no extended olive branch peace treaty here. It’s a story still very much in progress, with seemingly endless sequel potential in view.
