British-Palestinian Filmmaker Farah Nabulsi On Debut Feature ‘The Teacher’: “I Needed To Make This Film To Cope With The Injustice I’ve Witnessed” — Toronto
deadline.comWhen British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi was watching the UK media coverage of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011, it had a profound impact on her.
At the time, Shalit was an Israeli occupation soldier who had been abducted in 2006 by Palestinian freedom fighters and the first Israeli soldier to be captured by Palestinians since 1994.
Shalit was eventually released five years later in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners, including hundreds of which were women and children. “I remember thinking at the time that this was such a huge imbalance in the value for human life,” Nabulsi tells Deadline over a Zoom interview from Egypt, where she is attending her stepdaughter’s wedding. “One person in exchange for one thousand others!
But I also remember thinking about that on an individual level and that, to that soldier’s parents and loved ones, he would be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives.” This observation, coupled with Nabulsi’s numerous experiences in Palestine where she had encountered many members of the community who had experienced first-hand some “cruel and absurd things such as home demolitions, child prisoners in military detention, settler violence and vandalism,” were what ultimately inspired her debut feature The Teacher, which world premieres in the Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery program on September 9.
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