Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

The Teachers' Lounge

Ilker Çatak’s arresting new film
German Film Festival
by
ABR Arts 08 May 2023

The Teachers' Lounge

Ilker Çatak’s arresting new film
German Film Festival
by
ABR Arts 08 May 2023
Leonie Benesch as Frau Carla Nowak in The Teachers' Lounge (courtesy of Palace Films).
Leonie Benesch as Frau Carla Nowak in The Teachers' Lounge (courtesy of Palace Films).

Frau Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) stands in front of her class. A student volunteers a solution to the mathematical problem on the board. Carla responds, ‘Is that proof, or an assertion?’ This question will come to haunt Carla later, when it re-emerges in the school’s socio-political context, far messier than mathematics. At this point, director Ilker Çatak unambiguously declares his film’s central concern. What follows is an unravelling of Carla’s authority and moral certainty.

The Teachers’ Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) proves to be an engrossing, unsettling study of the challenges of living within a system that depends on uneven power dynamics. Çatak focuses tightly on the social order of the school, with the entirety of the film unfolding there. The restricted setting heightens the suspense. When teachers ask two representatives from Carla’s class which of their classmates might be responsible for a recent series of thefts, we sense that something is rotten here. Not long afterwards, Carla’s class is interrupted by a search and the Turkish-German Ali is found with a ‘suspicious’ amount of cash in his wallet. His parents are called into the school for what seems like an interrogation.

From the New Issue

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.