Joining a recent group of films about teachers and the communities they serve, ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ brings up difficult questions about the parent-teacher and student-teacher relationships as well as parent-children relationships. ‘The Teacher’s Lounge’, Kore-Eda’s ‘Monster’, Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’, Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s ‘About Dry Grasses’ and ‘Radical’ all share the dilemma of what to do about any aberration from society’s rigid system of education today.
Today we know that if a student objects to something about the teacher or something the teacher says in class, the teacher immediately bears a heavy burden to prove that the words or actions were a propos … I would like to compare and contrast The Teachers’ Lounge with Kore-Eda’s Monster, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, Nuri Bilge Ceylon’s About Dry Grasses, and Radical by Christopher Zalla in which a teacher in a Mexican border town full of neglect, corruption, and violence, tries a radical new method to unlock students' curiosity, potential - and maybe even their genius. It stars Eugene Derbez who also played a teacher in the same director’s Oscar winning Coda.
Our schools in the U.S. are undergoing great pressure. In the name of the children and their comfort zones, curriculums are deleting subjects that the right wing deems unacceptable (that is, that might “make the child uncomfortable”)— like race and sex education. The local parent associations also want to add a liberal dose of so-called Christian values to the curriculum. Teachers are quitting in the midst of allegations against them, they are hesitant to sign up to teach and they are very underpaid. These are not specifically the issues of the films above and yet they all are dealing with great pressures to do the right thing originating from their society’s antiquated systems.
We usually want inspirational teaching films like Black Board Jungle, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society. In this vein, Radical and The Holdovers are very satisfying. They bring us the teachers who inspire even us, the viewers, to want to excel because we have learned to love learning.
These others deal with problems the children face and how mismanaged the actions of the school are when dealing with anything out of line with their standard procedures.
In The Teachers’ Lounge, Leonie Benesch plays Carla, a new high school teacher. There’s a thief on the loose in school and when Carla thinks she’s caught the person on her computer camera, it changes everything regarding how she is treated by faculty, her students and the accused. The fascistic methods used by the administration coercing kids to name names and other methods of dealing with what they see as aberrations grates on her and us. When the school newspaper publishes an article hostile to her, she tries desperately to hold her world, the classroom, together…and fails miserably. The film succeeds in producing great anxiety, to say the least as we watch her dig herself into a hole she cannot dig herself out of.
Premiered at Berlinale 2023 and went on to play Toronto and other festivals.
Germany is the third most nominated country behind France and Italy. It has received 21 Oscar© nominations, with four wins (1979 The Tin Drum, 2002 Nowhere in Africa, 2006 The Lives of Others, 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front). This counts the five East German submissions that sometimes competed against West Germany.
Enigmatic director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was submitted once, in 1981, for Lili Marleen. He died the following year at age 37.
This is Germany’s 64th submission.
Sony Pictures Classics will release The Teachers’ Lounge on Christmas Day.
ISA: Be for Films has licensed The Teachers’ Lounge to Australia and New Zealand to Madman; Austria-Panda Lixhtspiele; Benelux-Cineart; France-Tandem; Germany and Austria-Alamode; Greece-Cinobo; Hungary-Mozinert; Italy-Lucky Red; Japan-King Records; Portugal-Alambique; Singapore-Lihthouse; So. Korea-Studio DHL; MENA (Middle East & North Africa)-Moving Turtle; Nordics (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Baltic)-Nonstop; Spain-A Contracorriente; Switzerland-Filmcoopi; Taiwan-Light Year Images; Turkey-Bir; U.K. and Ireland-Curzon; U.S. and Canada-Sony Pictures Classics
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