The Teachers' Lounge

Carla Nowak is a new and idealistic teacher. Thefts keep happening at the school and the administration's method is crude: the pupils in one class have their wallets opened one by one and suspicion falls on a boy of Turkish background. Carla objects and decides to gather her own evidence, leaving her laptop camera running in the staff room. What it records is a member of school staff. From there it leaves her control entirely: parents, colleagues, pupils and the school newspaper grow the incident like an infection. Ilker Catak directed and wrote it with Johannes Duncker. Leonie Benesch plays Carla, with Eva Lobau and Michael Klammer in the cast. The pupils were played by children with no professional experience. It was shot in twenty-seven days in a disused school building in Hamburg. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 96 percent with an average of 8.2. It won several German Film Awards including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress, was named by the National Board of Review among the year's five best international films, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. Worldwide gross was 5.4 million dollars. Who it is for: viewers who like moral tension escalating inside a closed institution. Who it is not for: anyone who wants resolution. The film never confirms who the thief is, and does so on purpose.