The Garden Cinema are proud to partner with our friends & neighbours at Hiba Express for a fundraiser screening of the highly anticipated Palestinian film The Teacher.
The screening will be preceded by a live Oud performance by Kareem Samara, and Hiba Express are kindly donating a Gaza Cola for each attendee. After the screening, a mini souq will be set up in the Garden Bar, giving attendees the opportunity to buy traditional Palestinian cake and other goodies. The proceeds of all ticket sales, as well as anything purchased at the souq, will go to the Gaza Cola funds, which is raising money to rebuild the Dignity Hospital in the north strip of Gaza.
Members' tickets are available for £15, and adult tickets for £17. There are also optional donation bands of £20, £25, and £30, if you would like to give extra.
Estimated timings:
14:00 Introduction and Oud performance
14:30 Screening of The Teacher
16:30 Mini souq in the Garden Bar
Please do stick around for some shopping after the screening. There will be stalls by Hiba Express, selling Palestinian cakes and Gaza Cola, and Maqam Books, who will be selling both brilliant Palestinian books, and hand-embroidered shirts by Boqaa, a clothing brand from a Palestinian refugee camp. There will also be crochet watermelons by couturier and silk artist Miami Megerditchian, and calendars by artist Tim Sanders available for purchase. All proceeds from the souq will help support a variety of Palestinian charities - please feel free to ask the vendors if you would like to learn more about them.
About the film:
A Palestinian school teacher (Saleh Bakri) struggles to reconcile his life-threatening commitment to political resistance with his emotional support for one of his students (Muhammad Abed El Rahman) and the chance of a new romantic relationship with a volunteer worker (Imogen Poots).
The Garden Cinema View:
The Teacher is released in the UK the very same week that a school in the West Bank is besieged by the Israeli army, its Palestinian pupils unable to go home. The film charts the countless ways in which the occupation has dehumanised Palestinians, and the generational traumatic toll it takes. Nabulsi skillfully portrays its impact on the average Palestinian through a rousing narrative, with just enough context and references to real life events to reach and emotionally connect with a wide audience.
The indignity and all-encompassing violence of the occupation permeates every aspect of life, the strain on Bassem’s marriage just one illustration of its domestic micropolitical costs. This is only Nabulsi’s second foray into filmmaking, following BAFTA award-winning short The Present, which in the same vein depicts the way in which Israeli checkpoints and settlements have turned the most routine, menial task - buying a new fridge - into a Herculean and perilous feat. Once again reprising his role as a beaten down dad, Saleh Bakri is as ever eminently watchable.
You can find other screenings of The Teacher here.