Inside ‘The Teacher’: Farah Nabulsi’s Feature Film on Occupation & Palestinian Resistance

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Farah Nabulsi joins Rania Khalek on Dispatches to talk about her powerful new film The Teacher, an emotional and political drama set in the occupied West Bank.

Inspired by true events, The Teacher follows a Palestinian schoolteacher as he confronts personal trauma, settler violence, and the capture of an Israeli soldier by the resistance, forcing impossible moral decisions that reflect the brutal reality of life under military occupation.

The film captures the full spectrum of colonial violence, from land theft and demolitions to military raids and daily humiliation, and it does so without reducing Palestinians to one dimensional victims or symbols. It’s raw, grounded, and quietly revolutionary.

Oscar-nominated director Farah Nabulsi tells @RaniaKhalek why she made her new film “The Teacher,” about a schoolteacher in the occupied West Bank: “The power of cinema is to bring it all closer” and “reverse the severe dehumanization” of Palestinians.