The Teacher

A lot has changed since 2021 when Farah Nabulsi’s powerful short film about a father and daughter navigating a checkpoint in the West Bank, The Present, was nominated for an Oscar. When the director began work on her subsequent feature, The Teacher, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories were at least nominally at peace. A few months later, the devastating assault on Gaza began, and life in the West Bank became still more heavily constrained. Set in the latter territory, this film portrays a world which no longer looks the same, but in doing so it serves as a reminder that key issues underscoring the conflict have been present for a long time.

Israel has been gradually confiscating land in the Occupied Territories, in violation of UN agreements, since 1967. The scenes we see at the outset of this film are sadly commonplace: a bulldozer crushing a family home despite the frantic efforts of teenager Adam (Muhammad Abed Alrahman) and his little brother Yacoub (Mahmoud Bahri) to protect it. Their mother, for her part, tries desperately to stop them, aware that whatever sympathy they might have attracted as children is now wearing off, that they could be perceived as enemy combatants. When she fails, their teacher steps in, succeeding in persuading them that their lives are more important than their home. Fortunately they don’t lose their pet rabbit, who is found alive, hiding in the rubble.

We follow the teacher, Basem (Saleh Bakri, best known in the West for his role in The Blue Caftan. Over time, he tries to build a relationship with Adam, to keep him out of trouble. He struggles to convey that he feels a similar frustration as regards the occupation, but that he thinks direct action will likely be futile and suicidal. Complicating this is his growing closeness to visiting British teacher Lisa (Imogen Poots), whom the boys in the school refer to, somewhat disparagingly, as Miss United Nations, and whose whiteness seems to label her as clueless if not actually as an oppressor. She, in turn, is unaware of Basem’s past as an activist, which becomes pertinent once again as it emerges that he may be the only person with a realistic prospect of negotiating a settlement and the freedom of a recently captured Israeli hostage, young army conscript Nathaniel.

Although the scenarios here are not always perfectly balanced (Nabulsi’s inexperience with long form storytelling shows) and the narrative is sometimes crude, most of the characters are complex, believable people, struggling to retain their humanity in a context where it’s easy to be overwhelmed by fate. Nathaniel’s story is inspired by the real life case of Gilad Shalit, and the pre-existing difficulties in his parents’ relationship help to make them recognisable as human beings even for viewers who are tempted to feel anger towards Israelis in general. At the same time, Nabulsi points up the extremist approach of some settlers, which leads to an additional crisis towards the end of the film and threatens to undo all of Basem’s careful work.

What can a teacher do in a situation like this? History itself is politicised. Academic education might provide a way out, but the more Adam learns about his own country, the more closely he feels bound to it; and the more desperate the situation gets, the more he is needed to attend to practical concerns and to look after Jacoub. Tugged in multiple directions, he finds himself connecting more closely with Basem all the same – but will he feel betrayed when he learns more about him? And do young men from backgrounds like this ever really escape? There are lessons for Basem, too, before the end.

A Teacher is not the most finely crafted film, but it is a cri de cœur, and one that sounds all the louder because of what has happened since it was made.

Reviewed on: 10 Apr 2025