When the ugliness of Israel’s crimes in occupied Gaza overshadows the ugliness of its crimes in the occupied West Bank, films like Farah Nabulsi’s latest release, ‘The Teacher,’ become all the more important.
The BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated Palestinian Director joins Mehdi to discuss her latest film, which centers around the struggle of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank through the lens of a school teacher there.
“The film is set in this sort of brutal, oppressive reality of militarily occupied Palestine, a place of apartheid that has been suffered by Palestinians for decades,” says Nabulsi, adding that highlighting that reality is not an easy task. “You really do have this reality unfolding around you that you're trying to do justice to in your film. So a lot of pressure.”
The movie, which was entirely shot in the occupied West Bank prior to October 7, 2023, was a complicated one to film, according to Nabulsi, “One evening we finished at two in the morning shooting a scene in the heart of Nablus only to wake up four hours later and receive messages that the Israeli military entered Nablus and blown up a house about two kilometers from where we were shooting.”
After crossing the hurdles of filming under heavy militarization in the occupied territories, Nabulsi still faced the hurdles of distributing a film that centers around the Palestinian struggle for liberation. “What's crazy is this is a British-Palestinian film, and I am a British-Palestinian filmmaker, and you would think that we would have got distribution in the UK, considering this film has won now 20 international awards… it ticked all the boxes, and yet we didn't have distribution.”
Nabulsi went on to self-distribute the film, which was released in the US just last month. Head to theteacher.film to find a screening near you.
Paid subscribers can watch the full interview above to hear some of Farah’s horrifying stories while filming in the occupied West Bank, and to see what she has in store for her next film.
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