The Kindergarten Teacher

Description

Poetry is the beating heart of Nadav Lapid’s rich and unsettling new work focusing on a teacher’s obsessive interest in one of her pupils. One day, the impassioned Nira spots her five-year-old charge Yoav reciting a poem to his nanny, a flow of words that he seems to have invented on the spot. Nira, an aspiring poet herself with a devotion to the written word, is on the lookout for inspiration and takes the boy under her wing for further instruction and guidance. When she appropriates one of Yoav’s poems as her own in the writing class she’s taking and insinuates herself into the boy’s life and artistry more than she should, the film takes on a thematic and stylistic richness that Lapid also displayed in his debut film Policeman (winner of the SFIFF 2012 New Directors Prize). Where that story looked at a particular event from two disparate sides, The Kindergarten Teacher has a more surgical exposition in mind, with a sometimes uncomfortably probing camera seeking the truth of the matter as Nira is trying to find her own truth through Yoav. Using his own writing from a very young age, Lapid complexly explores a world in which poetry is undervalued and the sometimes problematic extremes to which one woman will go to try and remedy this circumstance. —Rod Armstrong

Trailer

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Film Details