British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi stepped into Deadline’s Red Sea studio this week to talk about her debut feature The Teacher, the challenges of shooting a film in Palestine and how the journey of the film has changed since the Israel-Hamas war began this year following the October 7 attack.
“The Teacher is about a Palestinian school teacher who is struggling to reconcile his commitment to political resistance with the chance of a new romantic relationship with a British volunteer worker as well as his emotional support with one of his most promising students,” she told Deadline before adding: “It’s a film for me about the love of a child, the pursuit of justice and self-absolution, self-forgiveness. It’s also a film that has a theme about violence begetting violence, which is very pertinent to the current time.”
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The film, which premiered in the Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery program in September and is also playing at the Red Sea Festival, follows Palestinian schoolteacher Basem (The Band Visit’s Saleh Bakri) who acts as a father figure to two of his students Yacoub and Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) amidst turmoil in the West Bank. Upon meeting British volunteer worker Lisa (Imogen Poots), Basem struggles to reconcile his life-threatening commitment to political resistance and his emotional support for Yacoub and Adam with the chance of a new romantic relationship. Stanley Townsend, Paul Herzberg and Andrea Irvine also star.
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Nabulsi, who is Palestinian by blood but was raised and educated in the UK, says the film is an “amalgamation of all of these real-life events” and is a story that is “very much rooted in truth and reality but is a fiction story.”
The director went on to talk about the “very tough” conditions of shooting in the West Bank as well as the “emotional” and “mental” toll that it took on her as a director.
“For me, the toll was the emotional, mental toll that it took on me as a filmmaker who is trying to shoot a film that is set in a very harsh reality and you are shooting in that harsh reality while that reality is unfolding in real time around you, and that was very, very strenuous,” said Nabulsi.
Check out the video above.