The Teacher (2016 film)


The Teacher is a 2016 Slovak-Czech drama film. It premiered at the 2016 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where Zuzana Mauréry received an award for the best actress.

Plot

The film is set in 1983. Mária Drazdechová becomes a teacher at a suburban school near Bratislava. She uses her position to blackmail parents of her students to get benefits from them. Students whose parents disobey are bullied and given bad grades. The head teacher is afraid to intervene as Drazdechová is Chairperson of the school Communist Party branch. One of Drazdechová's students attempts suicide as a result of Drazdechová's bullying. This induces the school principal to call the parents for a meeting about a petition to remove Drazdechová from the school. There are parents whose children were bullied by Drazdechová and others who support her. Most of the parents are afraid of Drazdechová's connections and do not want to sign. The meeting ends in failure as only three families sign. It seems that Drazdechová won, but some families then change their mind and return to sign the petition. This results in Drazdechová being removed from school.
In 1991, two years after Velvet Revolution Drazdechová becomes a teacher once again. The film concludes with the same scene which it started – Drazdechová asks all her students about their parents' jobs. The only difference is that a portrait on a wall is of Václav Havel, not Gustáv Husák.

Cast

Box office

The Teacher grossed $64,437 in the United States and Canada and $1.9 million in other countries for a worldwide total of $1.9 million.

Critical response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 91%, based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 7.25/10. Metacritic reports a normalized score of 77 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".