“The Teacher”: Director Farah Nabulsi and Actor Saleh Bakri on New Film Based in Occupied West Bank

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to a feature film about the many challenges of life in the occupied West Bank. It follows a Palestinian schoolteacher struggling between his commitment to resistance and supporting one of his students. The film is called The Teacher. It was made and premiered at festivals before October 7, 2023, but it’s only being released in the United States this week. This is the trailer.

LISA: [played by Imogen Poots] I’m looking for one of your students, Yacoub Haddad.

PALESTINIAN WOMAN: Yacoub! Adam!

YACOUB: [played by Mahmoud Bakri] [translated] Great. Miss United Nations has arrived.

Welcome to our home.

LISA: How do you keep them on track in an environment like this?

BASEM EL-SALEH: [played by Saleh Bakri] Some of them stopped seeing the point anymore.

[translated] She’s come to see you. Maybe you can benefit from it.

LISA: You’re not confined in that prison anymore. And I’m here for you. You have to finish school. Yacoub, please, man.

YACOUB: [translated] They’re setting fire to the olives!

LISA: How’s Adam doing?

BASEM EL-SALEH: Lost.

ATTORNEY: I will work on this case, but it is not often that the state will bring women on charges.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] Have some hope and hold onto it.

ADAM: [played by Muhammad Abed Elrahman] [translated] But after everything you’ve been through, you still believe there’ll be justice?

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] We’re under huge pressure; otherwise, we would not have brought him here.

RADIO REPORTER: [translated] U.S. and Israeli dual national, 24-year-old IDF soldier Nathaniel Cohen, abducted over three years ago.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] Spies are everywhere, and informants are singing their lungs out.

ADAM: [translated] He’s that captured soldier, right?

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] You cannot tell a soul about this. No one. Do you hear me?

ADAM: [translated] I understand. I’m with you.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] The lives of over a thousand prisoners depend on that one soldier.

LIBERMAN: [played by Paul Herzberg] We will use every means possible to find him.

ADAM: [translated] He knew he was getting away with it. They all did! I swear he killed my brother!

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] Revenge eats away at you and destroys you from the inside, and it resolves absolutely nothing. Nothing!

There are things I will never be able to share with you. I am chained to my past.

[translated] Give me the gun, Adam.

Adam!

LIBERMAN: Mobilize a team to move in. Smoke them out.

BASEM EL-SALEH: They’ll keep him alive as long as it takes.

SIMON COHEN: [played by Stanley Townsend] How do you know that?

BASEM EL-SALEH: Because they know that your people believe your son is worth thousands of mine.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for The Teacher, a new feature film premiering tonight in New York at the Angelika. It’s directed by the BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated Palestinian British filmmaker Farah Nabulsi and stars the acclaimed Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, who’s both joining us in our New York studio today.

Being there last night was amazing at the Angelika, before the big premiere tonight. Farah, talk about making this film. You also wrote it. You directed it. And you actually did this years ago, over a period of years, and made the film, but only premiering it now.

FARAH NABULSI: Yeah, I wrote the film about five years ago. We shot it in militarily occupied, colonized Palestine approximately two-and-a-half years ago. And it premiered September 2023, as you mentioned.

You know, you’re shooting in territory that is a place of apartheid. It’s a place where you have illegal Israeli settlers, that kind of vandalism and violence every day that Palestinians endure. And you’re trying to do justice to that reality as that reality is unfolding around you in real time. So it was a very difficult process.

An example is that in the film, as you see in the trailer, we have a moment where there’s a home demolition. But on my way to work one morning, I passed by a couple with their six children on the side of the road in front of the rubble of their freshly demolished home.

So, it’s a fiction narrative, this film, but it is deeply, deeply rooted in the reality. And we struggled on many levels, you know, the normal pragmatic things of checkpoints and roadblocks, but really dealing with the oppression and the very blatant abuse and humiliation of Palestinians is something that weighs on you when you’re trying to carry out cinema. So, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a clip of the film The Teacher. Basem, played by our guest today, Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, is in his classroom speaking to a student, Yacoub, who had just been released from an Israeli prison after serving a two-year sentence over his involvement in a protest.

YACOUB: [played by Mahmoud Bakri] [translated] Wait for me. I’ll find you outside.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [played by Saleh Bakri] [translated] You can’t hand in work like this. It’s clear you made no effort. I know this year has been tough, settling back in. But remember, this is a chance to get back control of your life, and you’re just wasting it. Have another go, and there’s no shame in asking your brother if you need help.

AMY GOODMAN: Early in the film, in The Teacher, Israeli soldiers demolish the home where Yacoub and his brother Adam live with their mother. Their teacher, Basem, comes to visit them on the land where the brothers’ home once stood. Yacoub and Adam are sitting on a couch amidst the rubble of what was once their home.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [played by Saleh Bakri] [translated] Guys, I want to talk to you. How have things been at your uncle’s place?

YACOUB: [played by Mahmoud Bakri] [translated] Amazing! Stuffed in one bedroom with our four cousins.

ADAM: [played by Muhammad Abed Elrahman] [translated] Nothing nicer than sharing a room with four pubescents.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] I’ve been meaning to ask you about the payment for the demolition.

ADAM: [translated] Mum’s trying to figure it out. Our uncle can’t afford.

YACOUB: [translated] Let them go to hell, drink from the sea of Gaza.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] OK. I hope this is enough.

ADAM: [translated] Thank you. There’s no way our mother will accept this. No way.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] Tell her it’s for all the gardening work you did for me in the old days. You earned it.

YACOUB: [translated] Great. Miss United Nations has arrived.

BASEM EL-SALEH: [translated] She’s come to see you. Maybe you can benefit from it.

YACOUB: [translated] Player!

Hello, Miss Lisa. Welcome to our home.

LISA: [played by Imogen Poots] You’re not confined in that prison anymore. So now you seize this. You have to finish school. I know it’s not easy, but the alternative, Yacoub, is not something that I think you want. You just have to focus. Yacoub, please, man!

AMY GOODMAN: Yacoub is picking up binoculars in this scene. He sees a group of Israeli settlers from afar setting fire to several olive trees. He gets up and runs toward them. His younger brother Adam follows him as Yacoub confronts the Israeli settlers, one of whom shoots Yacoub in the chest, killing him. You play the teacher, Saleh Bakri. You play the star of this film, and you are Palestinian yourself. We’re seeing Palestinians killed. We’re seeing settler violence. We’re seeing demolition of homes. How was that for you to manifest as an actor?

SALEH BAKRI: You know, in our work, the tragedies we are living, we turn it into this energy that we get from the tragedies that we are confronting and that we are experiencing. It’s an energy that we can turn it into a creative energy, a creative — in a creative way. And that’s the privilege of art, that we can turn the sad reality, the difficult reality, into something creative, into something that we can share with all humanity.

And in a way, this form of resistance, art, in all its aspects, whether it is cinema, theater, painting, any kind of art, it’s a form of resistance that in the same time it cures the soul, our souls. It cures us from falling into feelings that distract you or feelings that make you blind, you know, like hatred or anything like that. So, it is a continuous struggle and a continuous resistance of this reality.

AMY GOODMAN: Where were you born?

SALEH BAKRI: I was born in Jaffa.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you live now?

SALEH BAKRI: Haifa.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you filmed this before October 2023, and yet here you are traveling the country and the United States as you premiere this film, from what was happening then to what’s happening today — Gaza, well over 50,000 people killed, the intensification and violence in the West Bank. What are your thoughts on that?

SALEH BAKRI: I am privileged. I can move. And I use this privilege. You know, the occupation wants us separated. And I find this separation. I am not —  I am not an alien in my homeland. I am part of these people. And I want to break this siege they put on us. And I want to go to Gaza. I want to work in Gaza. I want to do theater in Gaza. I want to do cinema in Gaza. I am not allowed. People in the West Bank are not allowed to come to Haifa to see my work in Haifa. So, we are scattered all around, not able or not allowed to gather and to work together, to learn from each other, to tell our story in a way, in a perfect way, in a way that — in a complete way. You know, I am not different from anybody who lives in the West Bank or in Gaza or in a refugee camp in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. So, I want to destroy, I want to dismantle these checkpoints, these borders all around Palestine, and to come together. I dream of Palestinians coming together again, doing — living their life, doing art, doing music together, telling their stories to the world, to themselves, learning from each other and teaching the world. This is my fight. This is my struggle. And this is our struggle, our collective struggle.

So, being here is part of it. You know, I am privileged to be here. The people in Gaza for more than 18 years now are segregated. They are in a prison, maybe the biggest prison on — prison on Earth. And they are facing a genocide. And we are facing it, all of us. And we are there. I feel maybe during these two years, I felt that I — that maybe the best place, the place I wanted to be most, is in Gaza, not anywhere else, not here. I want to be in Gaza now, you know, just to be with people and to be there, just to be there, to hug the mothers, the kids, the children, the fathers, and to try to do something on Earth.

I feel paralyzed. And, you know, I even find it hard to just comprehend what I am, as a Palestinian, is dealing with. What is it? How it inflicts me? How? What would come out of me after that, you know? So, for me, Israel must be held accountable for what — for the crimes it’s done, not only in Gaza today. Since 1948 until today, they made crimes, the continuous crimes since 1948 that they didn’t held accountable. And that’s why they are doing what they are doing now. And I hope that this genocide is the end of it, it’s the end of the Zionist regime in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 10 years ago, we had your father at this table, Mohammad Bakri, when he was facing jail for his documentary called Jenin, Jenin. But before we end, I wanted to ask you, Farah, about that theme that runs through this of a thousand Palestinians freed for one Israeli hostage.

FARAH NABULSI: You know, I think it comes back to a little bit about what you were asking Saleh. This morning, I was looking out my window, and I was thinking the equivalent, when we think about imbalance in value for human life. This is a story inspired by, in 2011, an Israeli occupation soldier was exchanged for over a thousand Palestinian political prisoners, hundreds of whom were women and children, hundreds of whom were being held in administrative detention, which, as you know, is without trial or charge. And that just seemed like such a massive imbalance.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.

FARAH NABULSI: But today, we can see that that is — there is no value for Palestinian life. And the equivalent in New York would be around a million Palestinians or a million New Yorkers being brutally killed, blinded, burned, and 8 million displaced. Where’s the value?

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Farah Nabulsi, BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated British Palestinian director, and Saleh Bakri, Palestinian actor and star of The Teacher. It premieres tonight in New York and around the country.