IFFK 2024: ‘The Teacher’, an honest portrayal of dehumanising oppression in Palestine

A sequence from ‘The Teacher’

A house, lived in for years, bulldozed by the Israeli military in front of its inhabitants, leaving behind a pile of tangible memories under the rubble. A youth resisting the burning down of an Olive orchard shot down by a settler with practised ease and nonchalance, just as if it were the most normal thing to do. Soldiers violently barging into every single home in a village in search of an Israeli military man who was abducted.

At least a few of the images that populate British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi’s debut film The Teacher, being screened in the world cinema section at the 29th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), are what one would expect from a film that chronicles the everyday struggles of the Palestinians. Yet, the film does not stay afloat merely on the strength of its cause. It has a compelling storyline that resonates emotionally with anyone who has some empathy to spare for oppressed people anywhere in the world.

The Teacher, inspired by a real story or rather many real stories, has Basem (Saleh Bakri) as a West Bank-based English teacher attempting to inject some sanity and ideas of peaceful resistance into his students, many of whom have gone through their struggles in the occupied territory. Basem’s central concern is for the brothers Yacoub (Mahmoud Bakri) and Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), both of whom were detained as teenagers in Israeli prison for a couple of years, merely for protesting.

The sheer injustice of their house being randomly bulldozed by the Israeli military is bound to drive the brothers to violent reprisal, but Basem acts as a kind of safety valve, impressing upon them the futility of vengeful violence. But any assumptions of Basem being a peacenik are soon countered with well-placed, intermittent flashbacks from his past, the role he played in the resistance movement and the personal losses that he suffered. One gets the true depth and breadth of this character only as the plot develops, revealing a practical intelligence which can be mistaken as world-weariness.

Parallel to their story goes the search of an American couple for their son, a soldier of the Israeli Defense Forces, abducted by a Palestinian group demanding the release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, a good number of them women and children. Initially, it appears to be a feeble attempt at bringing balance into a narrative where none exists, but it only adds to further spotlight the asymmetry of the whole situation.

This also sets up a tense, well-staged encounter between two fathers grieving for their sons – Basem who has already lost his son to Israeli violence and the American who is searching for his abducted son. The American father is also shown to be more empathetic while watching the dehumanising torture that Palestinians suffer at checkpoints through which he and his partner moves freely. The only strand that sticks out a bit is the romance between Basem and Lisa (Imogen Poots), a British volunteer at the school. Though parts of their emotional encounters work, often their interactions appear as needless distractions from an otherwise strong, tightly-structured plot.

Getting to watch a film which talks about the Palestinian plight at a popular film festival in the country has now become increasingly rare with there being instances of such films being removed after including them in the programmes in some festivals. Much of the audience at the packed screenings of the film at the IFFK appeared to be aware of the import of the screening, applauding to all the parts which were even remotely worthy of being applauded to.

One can sense the seething, and justified, anger under the surface of The Teacher, which makes its voice of reason all the more admirable.