Back to selection
Trailer Premiere: Mark Jackson’s LAFF-Winning This Teacher
Mark Jackson’s This Teacher — a Slamdance Closing Night film as well as the final U.S. Fiction winner at the now-shuttered Los Angeles Film Festival — is being released on DVD and digital formats June 9 by Breaking Glass, and the trailer has just dropped. Jackson (Without, War Story) is a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face who won the 2012 Audi Independent Spirit Award. Starring Cesar-winner Hafsia Herzi, the film’s a kind of existential cabin-in-the-woods thriller dealing with Islamophobia and American madness.
The synopsis:
This Teacher follows a French Muslim woman (Hafsia Herzi) as she travels to New York City from the rough neighborhoods outside of Paris to visit her childhood best friend.
When the reunion proves disastrous, Hafsia steals her friend’s credit card and identity, then disappears to a remote cabin upstate. Deep in the woods and alone for the first time in her life, she experiences a divine revelation of an existence without borders. But when she discovers that she is not alone on the property, Hafsia’s sojourn in nature gradually descends into a terrifying study of the intolerance and suspicion she encounters and reflects back to an Islamophobic America.
Director and cinematographer Reed Morano, who shot Jackson’s previous War Story, is executive producer, and in addition to the LAFF win This Teacher won the jury prize at Bend. Hafsia Herzi won a jury prize for acting at the Metz Subversive Film Festival.
