Teaching today is like sitting on a powder keg, you never know when it might explode. That is true for Amal (Lubna Azabal), a popular Brussels high school literature instructor who tries to inculcate a love of reading and freedom of expression as well as a sense of cohesion amongst her diverse class. She’s a Muslim, as are the majority of her students. But some of them come from a fundamentalist background and are intolerant of different points of view or sexualities. When a young woman in the class is persecuted for being gay, Amal hopes that she can open the hearts and the minds of her students by introducing them to the work of Abu Nuwas, a famous Muslim writer and poet from the 8th Century who wrote overtly homoerotic literature. But her initiative is met with outrage from some of the parents and things escalate from there. –Alissa Simon
Content advisory: bullying