The Kindergarten Teacher

[projekktor id=’20407′]

The Kindergarten Teacher is an Israeli drama written and directed by Nadav Lapid. The film premiered at Cannes last year and stars Sarit Larry, Avi Shnaidman, and Lior Raz.

In a world that does not appreciate artists, where sensitive souls don’t stand a chance, a poetry-loving kindergarten teacher discovers a child poet and decides to take it upon herself. To nurture him. To save his greatness from the world, to salvage him from the banal, the mediocre and the crude – to save him from life itself. It is the story of a female Don Quixote, who strives to save the world through the poetry of a child, and of a pensive child who has no desire to be saved.

Lapid’s film happens to be a bit of an autobiography. “Between the ages of four and a half and seven years old, I wrote around one hundred poems or, more precisely, I told them to my nanny. The first one, titled “Hagar,” was a love poem, a poem about an impossible love for the older sister of a classmate. “A Separation,” quoted at the end of the film, is one of my last. At the age of seven, I stopped writing poems. It wasn’t until the end of my military service that I began writing again, but never poetry. My parents had put my poems away in a closet and there they remained for twenty-five years, until I decided to use them for a film.”

The Kindergarten Teacher is rated 14A.