Lessons of a Dream

1874. A school in Braunschweig. Konrad Koch is hired to teach English, and English lessons are new in Germany at the time; some of the masters object to the language of an enemy country being taught. Koch comes into class with a ball. He teaches the boys football and teaches the language inside the game. The school authorities are uneasy; the game is found coarse and against discipline. Parents complain. One boy's father is an industrialist and a benefactor of the school. Koch is about to lose his post. Sebastian Grobler directs. Daniel Brühl plays Koch; Burghart Klaußner, Thomas Thieme and Jürgen Tonkel are in the cast. It is a German production. Its ground is a real person; Konrad Koch is counted among the teachers who wrote the first rules of football in Germany. The film uses the history freely and does not keep to the real Koch's life. The matter it treats is rigidity in education; football here is not a sport but an argument about method. The narrative takes on class as well; there is a scholarship boy at the school and he is treated differently. The film shows the nationalist mood of the period and the reaction against everything English. The narrative follows the shape of the teacher film and does not leave it. The ending closes on a match and the result is where expected. Its limit is predictability; the narrative is conventional, the conflict simple, and the ending too tidy. Who it is for: viewers who like period films and school drama. Who it is not for: it is conventional, didactic, and the ending easy.