Farah Nabulsi’s The Teacher is now playing in New York City, Los Angeles and Vancouver, and will open more widely on April 18.

The ongoing Israeli mass murder in Gaza and stepped up ethnic cleansing on the West Bank provide immediate, living context, if such be needed, for British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi’s The Teacher, a drama-tragedy set in the Occupied Territories. The urgent, moving film is Nabulsi’s debut feature. Her short film The Present garnered a 2021 Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film and won a BAFTA. (See review of The Present below)

In The Teacher, a mural pays homage to “Our Martyrs” in the school where Basem (the remarkable Saleh Bakri, from a well-known Palestinian acting family) teaches young men who have already spent time in Israeli prisons.

Basem takes a special interest in brothers Yacoub (Mahmoud Bakri, brother of Saleh) and Adam (Muhammad Abed El Rahman), who come home from school one day to find their house is under a demolition order by Israeli authorities. On top of that, they are then presented with a bill for the operation and the threat of imprisonment if they can’t pay! “Most of the houses in the village have demolition orders, including mine,” Basem tells Lisa (Imogen Poots), a British social worker who has come to work at the school. “They carry out the demolition orders and then charge the homeowners for the demolition.” (A new twist on the “bullet fee.”*)

Adding to the suffering, Yacoub is shot when he tries to prevent an Israeli settler from burning down an olive grove. At the same time, a young American who left the US to fight for Israel has been taken hostage by a Palestinian resistance group, which is demanding 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for his release. Basem’s secretive interaction with the fruit seller (Muayyad Abd Elsamad) indicate that he maintains his ties to the resistance movement.

The teacher’s life is also wracked with personal tragedy. His 16-year-old son was arrested years ago alongside Yacoub, but was tried as an adult by an Israeli court, given a sentence of eight years and subsequently died in prison.

Filmed mostly in the Nablus (West Bank) area, the movie is tense, enraged, and provides a sense of what Palestinian men and women experience on a daily basis under Israel’s horrific occupation.

“I came across a story about an Israeli occupation soldier who was abducted in 2006 by Palestinian fighters and he was released over five years later for over a thousand Palestinian political prisoners, of which hundreds were women and children,” Nabulsi explained in an interview with Arts & Culture. “I remember thinking at the time, what a huge imbalance in value for human life.”

“If you ask any parent what your child is worth to you, they can’t put it in numbers. I found that universal dynamic very interesting. … In the case of Basem, and indeed Adam, with his loss as well, there is no recourse to justice,” Nabulsi continues. “And it culminates what you see in the court scene, this idea that if the only people that Palestinians have to turn to for justice are one and the same as those complicit in the crime itself, the system is rigged. It is perverted.”

Nabulsi told the Hindustan Times that her parents “are Palestinians. They never shied away from their children knowing our origins, heritage and identity. I was always kept aware that a gross injustice had been done and there was a military occupation and a settler colonial enterprise that had been taking place in our historical land. But the difference was I wasn’t compelled to take further action in my life until I visited Palestine.”

The immense moral and political pressures brought to bear on the Palestinian population, as well as the conflicts and fissures they engender, bring to mind similar strains and terrors for people in those portions of Europe and elsewhere under Nazi rule during World War II.

This is a moving and valuable film.

*Certain governments, including the Nazi regime in Germany, have been known to charge the families of prisoners executed by firing squad the cost of the bullets used to end the lives of the condemned. This is known as a “bullet fee.”

*  *  *  *  *

Farah Nabulsi’s The Present: The brutality of Israeli checkpoints, WSWS, October 5, 2023

The Present, a 2020 film directed by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, has played at various film festivals and been warmly received. The short film treats the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, focusing on the brutal checkpoint system. (It was removed from Netflix, along with the rest of the “Palestinian Stories,” in October 2024.)

The film, co-written by Nabulsi and poet Hind Shoufani, was shot over six days at or around the infamous Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, Palestine. At that entry point thousands of Palestinian workers queue up as early as 3 a.m. to cross into Israel for work.

Yusef (played by the world-renowned Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri—The Band’s Visit, The Time That Remains, Wajib) takes his young daughter Yasmine (Mariam Kanj) to buy a gift for his wife Noor (Mariam Basha) on the couple’s wedding anniversary. The simple excursion, which also involves buying groceries, requires going only a short distance. But nothing is simple when confronted with the enormous hurdle of passing through a checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers who would rather abuse and demean Yusef than allow him to pass.

At the entry, Yusef is forced to remove the contents of his pockets and some of his clothing. He is then put in a cage with other men waiting for admittance. During the long wait, the traumatized Yasmine urinates in her pants.

The return trip home is made even more difficult because father and daughter are pushing a trolley with a new refrigerator—the anniversary present—that won’t fit through the gates of the checkpoint. More dehumanization: along with their groceries is a bag with Yasmine’s soiled pants. “You’re all disgusting,” sneers one of the Israeli soldiers.

Rifles are instantly pointed at Yusef when he loses his temper. Chafing at the injustice of not being allowed to navigate or bypass the checkpoint gates with his refrigerator, he nearly becomes another Palestinian casualty of war.

Beautifully shot by seasoned French cinematographer Benoit Chamaillard, the 25-minute movie dramatizes its points eloquently, forcefully and efficiently. In a world in which millions of refugees face insurmountable borders, Nabulsi, in an interview with eninarothe.com, speaks about a people whose freedom of movement is continually trampled upon.

In Palestine, she explains, there are more than “130 Israeli military checkpoints, another 100 or so ‘flying’ check points—that can appear anytime, anywhere—separate roads, curfews, the separation wall, a convoluted permit and ID system and of course the inhumane blockade of Gaza.”

These control mechanisms, Nabulsi says, “are all an assault on this basic human right, that in turn destroys so many other rights—like the right to get to work and earn a living and put food on the table for your children, like being able to visit friends and family, tend to your lands, get to a hospital or clinic, school, study at university—or in the case of my film, something as simple as being able to go and buy someone you love a gift!”

The director also speaks about the psychological ramifications and the “impact on the human spirit, and the harm it can cause an individual, families, children, and whole communities, caught in such an exhausting, stressful and deliberately humiliating infrastructure.”

In 2014, Nabulsi made her first trip to Palestine as an adult, where she saw up close the infamous wall “ploughing through villages, the refugee camps, the separate road system, the checkpoints, the settlements,” she explains in an interview with the National News.

“I have met with mothers whose 13-year-old boys were in military prison,” she notes in another interview, “I listened to their stories of how they were taken, what their experiences inside prison were. I have met families whose homes were demolished, and had tea with them on the rubble.”

Her filmography indicates her commitment: she wrote Oceans of Injustice in 2016 and Today They Took My Son in 2017 about a mother coping with her young son being taken away by the Israeli military.

Award-winning film director and journalist John Pilger commented about the latter that this “extraordinary film is a landmark work. It touched me deeply and made me angry all over again about the horror of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people. It points a finger straight at the rest of us, whose governments support Israel, and demand that we speak up now, and never stop until Palestinians are free.”

In 2018, Nabulsi wrote and directed Nightmare of Gaza.

“The arts play a crucial role in changing the world and I believe film precedes them all. It gives voice to the silenced, thereby helping build the empathy and understanding needed to effect change.” Farah Nabulsi