Not a month ago, the film community was taken aback by the news of Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal‘s lynching and subsequent kidnapping. The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who took home the 2025 prize for Best Documentary alongside Yuval Abraham for No Other Land, was beaten by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Then, instead of helping him, IDF soldiers who popped up on the scene took him away. Social media outcry and the fact that Ballal is such a public person granted him a swift release, but the story is nevertheless shocking. At a moment in which Gaza is under severe attack after the 2023 kidnapping of 251 Israeli hostages by Hamas, with the IDF’s actions often being called genocidal by international agencies such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, what was done to Ballal is a stark reminder that what is going on in the Middle East is not restricted to October 7 and its consequences. Now, as Farah Nabulsi’s 2023 movie The Teacher hits theaters in the US after years of looking for a local distributor, we get yet another reminder that Palestinian suffering is not restricted to the Gaza Strip.
Considering the context in which The Teacher is coming out, Nabulsi’s debut feature film is, of course, extremely relevant. And given that not many Palestinian or Palestinian-adjacent movies find distribution in the West — No Other Land itself is still having an extremely hard time finding any kind of backing — it is even an important watch. The Teacher, after all, offers us a window into a part of the world that, to many of us, remains invisible, and it does so in a courageous manner, refusing easy answers as well as the temptation to cast its characters as perfect victims. There is, indeed, a lot of merit to be found in what Nabulsi does in The Teacher. Because of these merits, it is not hard to understand the awards the film has received in the film festivals in which it was shown, such as the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Brooklyn Film Festival. However, when we really look at it, The Teacher is more than just a little flawed as a movie.
‘The Teacher’ Has Too Many Plots and Doesn’t Focus on Any of Them
The Teacher tells the story of Basem El-Saleh, the titular teacher, extraordinarily played by Saleh Bakri, who had already worked with Nabulsi on her 2020 Oscar-nominated short The Present. The movie focuses on Basem’s relationship with Adam (the equally amazing Muhammad Abed Elrahman), a student whose older brother, Yacoub (Mahmoud Bakri), has recently been released from prison for throwing rocks at Israeli forces, only to be shot dead by a settler. Or maybe it focuses on Basem’s relationship with British NGO worker Lisa (Imogen Poots), a tentative friendship that quickly evolves into something else. Or maybe the movie isn’t about Basem at all, even though he is the main character, but about Simon (Stanley Townsend) and Rachel Cohen (Andrea Irvine), a Jewish-American lawyer and his wife, whose son fled home to join the IDF and was kidnapped by resistance fighters.
Nabulsi tries to tell all of these stories at the same time and ultimately fails to make us care for any of them. There is not enough in terms of information and screen time for us to really get to the core of what is going on in any of those plots. Scenes are rushed so that we can get to other scenes that pertain to a completely different story, lest we forget about Adam and his family’s search for justice or Simon’s dealings with Israeli officers. One particularly egregious example is the conversation between Basem and Lisa that was supposed to establish the chemistry between the two characters. Instead of giving us some convincing dialogue, Nabulsi merely shows us the characters chatting silently under the score, forcing us to simply take her word for granted that Basem and Lisa are meant for each other.
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A quieter but just as powerful morality tale as ‘Oppenheimer.’
The saddest part is that there is a very interesting movie inside The Teacher. It’s a movie about a traumatized kid that finds out that his schoolteacher knows more about the comings and goings of resistance movements than he’s letting on, a movie about the tension between organized struggle and disorganized violence, perhaps even a movie about what needs to be done to protect childhood under extreme duress. This touching story, however, only appears on-screen for about 30 minutes of nearly two hours of runtime. And, to add insult to injury, these 30 minutes are interspersed with much less interesting interactions between characters that shouldn’t even be there to begin with.
‘The Teacher’ Could Do Without Its Surrogate Characters
Under the risk of incurring script-doctoring instead of film criticism, it needs to be said that Imogen Poots’ character could’ve been cut entirely from the movie with no detriment to the plot, or, at least, the plot that matters. Poots isn’t giving a particularly convincing performance, and her character feels mostly out of place in the world in which the film is set. The scene in which Lisa tries to compare Yacoub’s death at the hands of an illegal settler to her sister being killed in a hit-and-run is embarrassing to say the least, and her romance with Basem is never properly constructed. Lisa seems to exist as a surrogate for Western audiences, a result of Nabulsi’s inability to believe that non-Palestinian viewers would be able to connect with Basem’s story if it had been presented on its own. And, you know, perhaps she’s right, but that doesn’t change the fact that Lisa is a strange addition to The Teacher. The same can be said about Simon and Rachel, whose plot is so poorly developed that it feels like a last-minute call.
In the end, it always feels kind of weird to criticize movies like The Teacher. After all, they are so important that we want them to be good, to be memorable, to accurately depict the suffering of the people they are trying to represent. Alas, The Teacher is not what it sets out to be. It is too melodramatic, too bloated, and too messy to work. Still, we should be glad that this movie is getting a release. We need more Palestinian stories and stories about Palestine, particularly at this moment in history – good stories, bad stories, mediocre stories. And The Teacher has a seed of something inside of it. Perhaps in her following movies, Nabulsi will be able to touch on the topics that she truly wants to approach. Right now, it is not her moment.
Nabulsi’s debut film is too bloated to properly work.
- Release Date
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May 16, 2024
- Runtime
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118 minutes
- Director
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Farah Nabulsi
- Writers
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Farah Nabulsi
- Saleh Bakri and Muhammad Abed Elrahman deliver amazing performances as Basem and Adam.
- There is an interesting plot about the tension between organized resistance and disorganized violence in there somewhere.
- The movie has too many central plots going on and ultimately tries to juggle more than it can.
- Basem’s romance with Lisa is extremely underdevloped.
- Imogen Poots’ character feels completely out of place in the story.
- The same can be said for Stanley Townsend’s and Andrea Irvine’s.
