‘This Teacher,’ Mark Jackson’s Provocative Film About Fear And Racism In America

Hafsia Herzi as “Hafsia” in “This Teacher” by Mark Jackson.

Mark Jackson Courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures

In 2017, writer/director Mark Jackson (Without, War Story) made a brilliant and wholly absorbing film called This Teacher, directed by Jackson and co-written with his partner Dana Thompson. Now, with a global pandemic underway and the upcoming US presidential election, This Teacher is timelier than ever, and essential viewing.

After premiering at the 2018 Los Angeles Film Festival, This Teacher went on to BFI London, where it was named a Grand Jury Winning Film as well as a crowd favorite, and Slamdance Film Festival, where it was the closing night film.

Now available to global audiences across digital VOH and DVD platforms, This Teacher offers a timely and compelling story, stellar performances and an unforgettable protagonist: Hafsia, played by Hafsia Herzi.

Hafsia is a young, French Muslim woman living in Paris. At a moment of uncertainty in her life, she is gifted a trip to New York City by her childhood best friend, Zahra (Sarah Kazemy), who is living with a wealthy white man in a life very different from Hafsia’s own. When the trip quickly sours, and the women come to the realization their friendship has turned toxic, Hafsia makes the impulsive decision to take a solo trip to a secluded cabin in the woods Upstate. She has little money, and a cell phone that is constantly in the process of losing charge. Her unsettling journey makes the viewer feel at any moment it could turn into something much more sinister and when Herzia encounters an Islamophobic American couple (Lucy Walters and Kevin Kane) things take an unsettling turn.

I spoke with Jackson about what inspires him, his experience teaming up with Herzi for the second time and his strategies for staying creative during quarantine.

Risa Sarachan: How do you see this pandemic affecting art in a broader sense?

Mark Jackson: World War II gave birth to Italian Neo-realism, so what if the pandemic paved the way for an American version of minimalist guerrilla filmmaking that portrayed this unique form of hardship we all currently share? We could reject the propaganda of commercial escapist cinema and tell stories that inspire people across the political spectrum to see that their differences are petty and minuscule compared to what they are poised to gain from a unified working-class movement. There is a great deal of anti-establishment sentiment in this country, but it has unfortunately been diverted largely into illusory division. Like the post-war period, there will be tremendous suffering, but we, too, can reject fascism and find hope through compassion (like the ending of Bicycle Thieves).

I honestly don’t know how to answer your question, but wouldn’t it be great to see Rome, Open City 2020 made on a phone in Louisville? Wouldn’t it be great to watch the story of another American hero like Ferguson’s Cori Bush rising from the ashes of tragedy in Kenosha to fight for us in congress?

Sarachan: Are you able to access creativity in quarantine?

Jackson: The pandemic has laid bare a lot of ugliness, and quarantine has been anything but peaceful. It has shown us explicitly and unambiguously that, as a society, we value corporate private property over individual human life. The righteous battle of the Black Lives Matter movement is incredibly inspiring. It douses the fire already burning in my belly with gasoline. Society is made, and we can remake it. So, there is no shortage of inspiration to access creativity, but there are inevitable moments of despair.

If I’m having a tough time, I try to do something that I would be doing regardless of the pandemic. Walk the dogs I love and look at a tree and think: I love this tree, and I would love this tree if there were no coronavirus. This tree I love was around before the pandemic and will be around after the pandemic and will carry my love long after I’m in the ground. Thank goodness for my beloved Dana and trees and dogs and the relatively inexpensive joys of pizza and beer and tacos and donuts all working in harmonious tandem to keep me sane enough to write my little movies.

Sarachan: What inspired the creation of This Teacher?

Jackson: When asked this question, I’ve often referenced the Muslim travel ban and the white supremacist Charlottesville rally, but, This Teacher was also inspired by the never-ending wars in Arab countries. And the Neoliberal destruction of the welfare state. And the mass working-class despair that paved the way for a fake populist to run and win on a platform of overt racism, xenophobia, misogyny, paranoia and hatred. I’d worked with the immensely gifted Hafsia Herzi on my previous film, and we wanted to team up again in order to provide a humanizing portrait of a Muslim woman. 

Hafsia Herzi as “Hafsia” and Sarah Kazemy as “Zahra” in the film “This Teacher”

Mark Jackson

Sarachan: How did Executive Producer Reed Morano (Executive Producer of The Handmaid’s Tale) get involved with this project?

Jackson: Reed and I worked together on my previous feature called War Story. It was a real battle, and Reed is the exact type of ally you want in the trenches with you. She is the unicorn combination of a great director, a great director of photography and a great friend. Absolutely invaluable eyeballs to have on whatever you’re working on in whatever phase of the process, and I feel so lucky that she saw a cut of This Teacher and wanted to be involved. All three of her films as a director have delivered a subversive arthouse take on an established cinematic sub-genre. To witness an artist continue to take risks even as their career climbs and the stakes get higher and higher is incredibly inspiring. I love her!

Sarachan: Hafsia Herzi gives such a complex and brilliant performance in this. Can you tell me a little bit about your working relationship with her?

Jackson: Hafsia is a force of nature, and I loved working with her. It’s such a gift being able to write for someone who you know can do absolutely anything. My French is bad, and there is a bit of a language barrier, but we manage just fine. When I was trying to talk to her in French before the big emotional scene to be shot in one long, uninterrupted take, I was like, “You’re sad, you’re really sad, but then… you’re not sad.” And I kept sputtering until she was like, “I got it.” And I shut up, and she did her thing, and she just split wide open and took my breath away. She has such power as a performer. I love her. Her first feature as writer/director/producer/star Tu Mérites un Amour is an astonishing debut and won a prize at Cannes and needs to get distributed over here. There’s a French saying that she’d always tell me, “Jamais deux sans trois!” Which means ”Never twice, without a third time!” And I really hope we make a third film together.

Sarachan: Why did you feel Hafsia needed to have her spiritual awakening that takes place in the film outside of New York City?

Jackson: The Buddha taught us that the cause of suffering is attachment and the letting go of attachment is the way out. The antagonists of our film are attached to the familiar because of their gut-deep fear of the unknown. Hafsia’s dissatisfaction with the status quo and her deep and authentic openness to change, is what made her ripe for an awakening. My co-writer Dana describes a spiritual awakening as “suddenly perceiving life without borders,” and I found that idea to be utterly beautiful. Hafsia’s transcendence of self is meant to illustrate the capacity we all have as humans to rise above our limited points of view and to perceive no separation between ourselves and others.

What did the Buddha say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything. 

Lucy Walters as “Rose” and Kevin Kane as “Darren” in “This Teacher”

Mark Jackson

Sarachan: Why the decision to separate the film into acts?

Jackson: I really loved movies as a kid, but it wasn’t until I discovered old Italian and European cinema towards the end of my college days that it occurred to me that I could also make movies. Growing up, my favorites were perfect pieces of entertainment like Ghostbusters and Rocky IV and Beverly Hills Cop, so I needed to watch slow, old, difficult, rough around the edges, black and white movies in order to finally see the underlying mechanics of cinema. Those foreign films did not adhere to the traditional three-act hero journey structure that American cinema follows so religiously. I went to film school over in Italy because it was basically free, and that cemented the unconventional approach to narrative structure. So, creating act chapter title cards is a small step in my professional development towards one day, hopefully, making a secretly Marxist Marvel movie about Spiderman villain Tarantula. Tarantula first appeared in Spiderman comics in ’74 hailing from the fictional country of Delvadia and was inspired by the overthrow of Chile’s Allende in a US backed fascist coup in ’73. My reimagining of Tarantula will be inspired by Mario Benedetti’s poem “Allende.” Here’s the final bit of that poem:

to kill the man of peace

to strike his forehead clean of nightmares

they had to become a nightmare

to defeat the man of peace

they had to join themselves forever to death

kill and kill more just to keep killing him

and condemn themselves to blinded loneliness

to kill the man that was the people

they had to lose the people.

Sarachan: This Teacher premiered a couple of years ago but is still very relevant. How do you feel it reflects the attitudes of the current moment? 

Jackson: Dana and I wrote this thing two and a half years ago. I would love nothing more than for this film and its message to no longer be relevant, but very unfortunately, it remains a “timely” piece of anti-racism/bigotry. 

The majority of Americans who engage with politics tend to do so as if it’s a sporting event and root for their team and its players as spectators instead of critically evaluating their records and policies and seeing politicians as public servants that work for us. Most regular folk lose regardless of who’s winning the game because both teams are anti-regular folk.

That being said, I am a born and bred American, so I can’t help but engage with politics in the same celebrity-obsessed fashion, and I’m a huge fan of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Our two Muslim members of congress have endured absolutely despicable treatment, and buckets of money have been thrown at defeating them, yet they’ve managed to win their 2020 primaries in landslides and fight on as bold, progressive leaders. And they come across as real and relatable and genuine and not as phony politicians. My hope is that their continued prominence on a national stage can open more doors in all areas, including moving us forward with the representation of Muslim characters in cinema and television that isn’t just the corporate concept of diversity.

A still from “This Teacher” Hafsia Herzi as “Hafsia” and Sarah Kazemy as “Zahra”

Mark Jackson

Sarachan: How have Muslim audiences reacted to the film?

Jackson: Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we had our theatrical engagement cancelled, and I only attended a couple of festivals, but we had a really warm reception at the BFI London Film Festival with a predominantly Muslim audience. A Muslim critic who caught the film in London, Musanna Ahmed, gave it a very generous review for Film Inquiry and said it “contains the most three-dimensional portrait of a Muslim character I’ve seen in some time for a Western film, owing a lot to the fact that the filmmakers render Hafsia as a complex human being and not simply an avatar for an idea or community.” I would add that its success also owes a heckuva lot to the brilliance of Hafsia Herzi.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

This Teacher can be viewed here.