İlker Çatak’s “The Teachers’ Lounge” (Sony Pictures Classics) is among the most nerve-shredding of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best International Feature Film. Representing Germany in the Academy Awards race, the film is now available as of March 5 to buy or rent on digital platforms, and IndieWire shares an exclusive extended scene from the film in the video above.
This clip establishes many of the tensions to come in the drama film about the dramas behind the scenes of a seventh-grade classroom in the fallout of a student being accused of theft. Teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) decides to get involved, only to end up caught between her own ideals and those of the school system. İlker Çatak and Johannes Duncker wrote the film based on an incident from their own school days.
“As Carla becomes enmeshed in controversy after a well-meaning attempt to identify a classroom thief, the audience is never quite sure how she’s going to behave, how she’s going to handle each succeeding situation. As both the teachers and students criticize her, is Carla going to break down under the stress? Is she going to make more mistakes? Not knowing how it’s going to turn out builds anxiety and tension,” as IndieWire’s Anne Thompson wrote.
“That was the goal,” Çatak told IndieWire. “We put pressure on our character. We don’t want it to be airy. You want it to have a drive, also be a thriller.”
He added, “The whole society in which we are living in post-factual times. We quickly realized that school is a model for society: you have people in charge, you have the president, you have a school paper, you have lawyers advocates. … We have a very modern woman and teacher who’s on the right side of things, who also maybe thinks that she’s on a moral high ground. But then all of a sudden she runs into people who think they have the moral high ground, and so she gets canceled. This [captures] the whole absurdity of our times, where I cannot keep track anymore of what’s going on and whose position is what, and why are people fighting all the time instead of listening to each other? And if you go on Twitter, it’s warfare. And when you have an idea that makes sense, the screenplay writes itself.”
As I wrote in my passionate plea for “The Teachers’ Lounge” to at least get some due Oscar consideration, the 2024 Best International Feature Oscar lineup is among the best in years — and stacked with movies that, you know, people have actually seen, from “Society of the Snow” on the Netflix charts to “The Zone of Interest” at a $12.7 million global gross and counting. It’s fait accompli at this stage in the race that “Zone of Interest” and A24 are taking this one home. Well deserved.
But a welcome upset, and a movie anyone who’s seen has responded to, is airtight German thriller “The Teachers’ Lounge,” an impeccably crafted, 98-minute freefall that turns the politics of a seventh grade classroom into a metaphor for a destabilized global community. In this Berlinale premiere named among the National Board of Review’s top five international features of the year, Çatak and Duncker elevate the drama to the level of opera as the teacher’s world spins off its axis, offering no easy morals.
