It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.
In one scene, for instance, West Bank teenager Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), burning with anger and grief – his house has been bulldozed and his brother shot dead by a Jewish settler – sits down in front of the evening news: “Bombs continued to pound Gaza today,” announces the unseen newsreader.
The Teacher premiered at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, just a few weeks before the attacks and aftermath of 7th October which lend an almost unbearable topicality to this human drama about genocide and hostage-taking.
The subject of the film is Adam’s teacher Basem, played with subtle intensity by Saleh Bakri, a former freedom fighter now promoting non-violence and trying to stop his pupil taking revenge.
Less successful are two sub-plots presumably intended to boost the movie’s international appeal. One involves Basem’s slow-burning romance with an English aid worker (Imogen Poots, pictured above with Bakri), whom his students nickname “Miss United Nations”. Poots brings depth to a wafer-thin characterisation by dint of some fine non-verbal acting, but unfortunately the dialogue between the lovers is often excruciating.
The other sub-plot involves the anguish of the Cohens, a Jewish American couple whose volunteer son has been taken hostage by Palestinian militants seeking the release of over a thousand men, women, and children held in Israeli jails.
It’s the hard yards of parenthood, in other words, that gives the plot a unifying theme, but at times its over-construction – Basem is not only a father-figure to Adam but also grieving his own son who died in Israeli detention – sends the film spiralling off into sentimental cliché.
The cinematography by Gilles Porte, however, is as handsome and understated as Bakri’s performance. One shot, in particular, of Adam’s dying brother framed by burning olive trees is more eloquent about the political landscape than anything that follows. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised if a film entitled The Teacher turns out to be rather didactic.
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