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

A feature film about life in the occupied West Bank, The Teacher, opens in New York tonight and in theaters across the U.S. next week. The film, which is inspired by true events, centers a Palestinian schoolteacher who struggles to reconcile his commitment to political resistance with supporting his student. “It’s a fiction narrative, this film, but it is deeply, deeply rooted in reality,” says Farah Nabulsi, director of The Teacher, which is partially based on the 2011 prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel, in which one Israeli soldier was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Nabulsi and Saleh Bakri, the acclaimed Palestinian actor who stars in The Teacher, speak to Democracy Now! about the resonance of the film in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “The occupation wants us separated,” Bakri says. “I want to dismantle these checkpoints … I dream of Palestinians coming together again.”