Screened as part of NZIFF 2018

The Kindergarten Teacher 2018

Directed by Sara Colangelo

Maggie Gyllenhaal is riveting as a teacher and aspiring poet thrown off kilter by the conviction that only she can guard and nurture the lyric talent of a gifted five-year-old student.

USA In English
96 minutes DCP

Rent

Director

Producers

Talia Kleinhendler
,
Osnat Handelsman-Keren
,
Maggie Gyllenhaal
,
Celine Rattray
,
Trudie Styler

Screenplay

Sara Colangelo. Based on the film Haganenet by Nadav Lapid

Photography

Pepe Avila del Pino

Editor

Marc Vives
,
Lee Percy

Production designer

Mary Lena Colston

Costume designer

Vanessa Porter

Music

Asher Goldshmidt

With

Maggie Gyllenhaal
,
Parker Sevak
,
Anna Baryshnikov
,
Rosa Salazar
,
Michael Chernus
,
Gael García Bernal

Festivals

Sundance
,
Sydney 2018

Awards

Directing Award (Dramatic)
,
Sundance Film Festival 2018

“Maggie Gyllenhaal gives her best film performance in years as Lisa Spinelli, a 40-year-old Staten Island teacher who is somewhat adrift in life. Her teenage kids are more invested in Instagram than family dinners and she’s not doing as well as she’d like in her poetry class (taught by Gael García Bernal). One day after school, she hears one of her five-year-old students, a sweet boy named Jimmy Roy, recite a poem. It’s a beauty. She becomes fascinated by this child who seems to enter a trance and produce gorgeous, pure art… Lisa becomes convinced that Jimmy is a once-in-a-generation talent, and she’s going to do whatever it takes to help that flower grow. And she’ll push back against everyone who stands in her way, even if it destroys her life.

Gyllenhaal, appearing in every single scene of the film, gives a completely committed, three-dimensional performance... It’s a performance always on the edge of danger as we worry with increasing alarm that Lisa is going to do something very, very wrong. It’s a thriller almost, but it’s suspense that's borne out of human need for something real in a world that feels increasingly fake.” — Brian Tallerico, Rogerebert.com