Watch The Kindergarten Teacher For Free

Why so much hype?

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

"The Kindergarten Teacher (2014 release from Israel; 120 min.) brings the story of Nira, a kindergarten teacher, and Yoav, a 5 yr. old boy in her class. As the movie opens, we see Nira talking to her husband about the remarkable gift the boy has, spewing poetry at any given time. The boy's nanny confides that she is using the boy's poets at her auditions. Meanwhile, Nira and the boy grow ever closer. To tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.Couple of comments: this is the second movie from up-and-coming writer-director Nadav Lepid, who previously brought us "Policeman". In the DVD extras, he discloses in an interview that the story is mostly auto-biographical, to my surprise. Turns out that Lepid as a young boy went around proclaiming poetry out of nowhere. As to the relationship between Nira and the boy, once it becomes clear how protective she feels about the boy, the only question that remains is how far she will take it... The two main characters are portrayed beautifully by Sarit Larry as Nira, and even more impressive is Avi Schnaidman as the young boy. In the director's interview in the DVD bonus materials, he explains how they went about casting for the role of the young boy.I don't think this movie ever saw a US theatrical release 9and if it did, it never came to Cincinnati), which is a darn shame. I picked this up while browsing the foreign movie section at my local library. I continue to be impressed with the quality of movies coming out of Israel. For such a small country, they sure do have some great movies. If you are in the mood for a high-quality "all talk, no action" movie, you cannot go wrong with "The Kindergarten Teacher".

Although we felt it didn't quite succeed, even on its own terms IMHO, "The Kindergarten Teacher" is still very watchable. The dour social criticism—poetry no longer has a place in the state of Israel!—didn't really speak to us, though the satirical portraits of the PC haters in Nira's poetry class and the weirdos at the poetry slam were quite amusing, in a depressing way. The main storyline, Nira's relationship with the chubby-cheeked prodigy, Yoav, gets your attention right away and really builds; our main complaint was that Yoav's character seems inconsistent—he's withdrawn and suspicious at first (and rightly so!), then suddenly turns trusting and confiding, without any real transition. (Maybe he just realizes he's found a new amanuensis to copy down his poems; we, on the other hand, were sorry to see the last of Israeli singing star Ester Rada, who plays Yoav's nanny, Miri.)Another plausibility problem, at least judging by the subtitles, is that even the best read five-year-old could never have composed the poems he recites ("banality"? really?)… The plot line got a little too cryptic for our taste as well—there's a teasing suggestion that Yoav's poems were actually written by Miri, another that he's channeling in verses recited by his uncle years before—and there are a couple of episodes meant to illustrate the, as it were, banality of Nira's life that seem like filler, but writer/director Nadav Lapid pulls it all together in the almost wordless final scene, set in a glitzy Sinai resort, that really makes it clear what Nira's nutty mission was all about.

The premise for The Kindergarten Teacher is a strange one in which a 5-year-old student of the titular character is a prodigy poet, and his teacher attempts to give him a better life. The primary subject of this film is this teacher's clear, unhealthy obsession with this child, which we never fully come to understand, but it is extremely unsettling.Early in the film we see this teacher attend what seems to be a class on poetry, and she uses various poems by the young child in her kindergarten group as her own work. It is unclear whether this is to make sure the child's poems have merit or if it is to simply submit something to class as her own work. These poems seem to be impromptu, but it is clear as the film goes on that at least some planning or method is behind what he "writes" since he will pace back and forth and then announce he has a poem and start to recite it.The teacher is a hypocrite since she criticizes the child's nanny for reciting his poems in auditions while she herself is also using the poems as described in the previous paragraph. Eventually the teacher makes the situation more about the child than about her, bringing him to a poetry seminar of sorts in order for him to be noticed by people who will actually appreciate him for what he does, unlike the boy's father who the teacher disagrees with.What makes this film intriguing is the state of desperation the titular character delves into as she becomes more and more involved in the boy's life. The actress playing the teacher plays the part with a cold, emotionless demeanor, suggesting she needs or wants a child in her life as she is lifted up around the boy. Towards the end of the film, there are clearly so many insecurities in her character as she is in a deteriorating state of mind, and this is the main strong point of the film.3.0/4.0

Nira (Sarit Larry), a kindergarten teacher for fifteen years, is stunned when Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), her five-year-old student, announces in school, "I have a poem." The poem consists of only five lines, but the teacher finds magic in the words that the boy has seemingly just created while walking back and forth in the play area as if in a trance."Hagar is beautiful enough Enough for me Enough for me Gold rain falls over her house. It is truly the sun of god."Brilliantly shot in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem by Shai Goldman, The Kindergarten Teacher, Israeli director Nadav Lapid's (Policeman, 2011) second feature, can be seen as a representation of an Israeli society where poetic sensibility has become lost in a culture that glorifies materialism, and where even the idealistic have lost their moral compass. A strangely affecting and disturbing film, The Kindergarten Teacher is at times perverse but also has moments of haunting beauty. When Nira becomes convinced that Yoav is a poetic genius, comparable in her mind to the four-year-old Mozart, she become obsessed with a desire to protect him from an uncaring father (Yehezkel Lazarof), a wealthy restaurateur, and a mother who has taken off with a lover, but soon begins to cross the line between teaching the boy about life and protecting him from it. On the surface, Nira is a caring person, but the first hint that not all is right is when she passes off Yoav's poems as her own in her weekly poetry class, but fires Yoav's nanny Miri, (Ester Rada) when she learns that Miri also uses the boy's poems in her acting auditions. Gradually, we begin to suspect that Nira sees the world only in terms of black and white, where there are no shades of gray or room for complexity. Lapid puts Nira's worldview in a larger context, "Israel society," he says "has developed a hermetic way of looking at the world, and it justifies everything, like we are the victims, and we are in permanent danger, and it creates a perfect order." When Nira leads the class in the Hanukah song, Mi Yimalel, which says that "In every age, a hero or sage came to our aid," the feeling is that Nira, the wife of a husband (Lior Raz) who watches game shows on TV, and the mother of a son serving in the military, sees herself as a present day Judas Maccabeus, an unlikely hero who will rescue Yoav from a world that is out to rob him of his individuality and sensitivity. Lapid compares Nira's story to going to war "against a society that sanctifies profit, gain, richness, materialism," a society in which "the radical's rebellion suffers from the same diseases they try to heal, which is always the tragedy, and the inevitable destiny of the one who goes to war with his time." Nina's Christ-like decision to save Yoav from what she sees is his inevitable fate mirrors her own feelings of being the victim of a world where poets are anachronistic and sensitive souls are rejected. Like Christ, she is willing to suffer for other's sins, but does not seem capable of reflecting on the true meaning of grace.