2024-02-02 22:09:59
The cliché says that the citizens of the future are formed in a class, and although it is true, what the cliché forgets is that what children do is soak up the behaviors they see around them. They simply reproduce, even instinctively, the behaviors and patterns that mark the daily life of their community. Therefore, observing what happens in a school is a good way to see what is reaching them, what things they are absorbing like sponges and repeating among their classmates. For the German director Ilker Çatak, society fits in a classroom of high school kids, and that society is permeated by racism, machismo, classism, tension, fake news and power struggles.
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A metaphor for today’s world that follows the classic snowball narrative. Or how a small, almost anecdotal event ends up causing an earthquake in all those involved. Here it is the theft that is committed in a classroom that triggers the tragedy. The strict teachers decide that searching all the children’s backpacks and purses will be the solution. The first one pointed out? An immigrant student. There begins a game of accusations that splashes the teachers, who enter the spiral to its ultimate consequences.
A script that grows with the tension of a thriller and that was born from an experience of the director and his co-writer Johannes Dunker. “We went to school together, and during our school days we had an incident that was very similar to the one at the beginning of the movie. We were in class, and suddenly three teachers came in and asked us to put our bags on the table. “We talked about this more than 20 years later and we thought it was a good beginning for a story,” explains the director, who won at the German Film Awards for No news at the front and that this year it is nominated for the Oscar for Best International Film, where it will face The Snow Society.
For Çatak “it is not difficult to realize” that a class functions as a trompe l’oeil of any society. “A school is very similar to a state. You have a president, you have people in charge, like teachers. You have the students, which is the people, and you even have a newspaper, which is journalism. All of these elements that create our society are there, and we quickly learned that once you make a movie about school, you make a movie about society,” he explains.
Racism does not take long to appear. “It is not a coincidence that the first child identified is Turkish. I was the only Turkish kid in my class back then and I remember feeling a kind of strange alienation at school as I was trying to fit in. When I grew up I thought I had made it, I speak the language better even than many Germans, but suddenly you realize that you are still not as accepted as you think, because people stop you in the street, the police stop you for no reason, and when you go to the US they stop you at the border and put you in a room. You look at the others in that room and they are all Muslims, or people who look like you. I also wanted to talk about how I’ve been trying to hide my identity during certain times in my life when I didn’t want to speak my language. And that can be seen in Carla’s character,” he adds.
A school is very similar to a state. You have a president, you have people in charge, like teachers. You have the students, which is the people, and you even have a newspaper, which is journalism.
Ilker Çatak — Cineasta
Carla, its protagonist, adds another layer to the theme of racism. One that German cinema does not usually talk about, the prejudices that still exist towards the population of Polish origin. They doubted and thought a lot about the past of their protagonist, but finally they wanted to talk about “prejudice towards Poles in Germany, who are said to be thieves, who steal… it’s horrible, but those prejudices are there.” To help them build the script, they used a book by Margarete Stokowski about how she grew up in Germany as a descendant of a Polish family.
Also appearing, of course, is the machismo towards this young teacher. Her classmates question her decisions because she is a woman, because she is younger than them, because she is the rookie. “There is a lot of sexism and a lot of classism towards her. Since she is young she doesn’t know shit, since she is a woman they will tell her that she is an idealist, since she has only been around for a short time they will tell her that she doesn’t know anything”, she points out about all the pressures that she, the protagonist of her, suffers. .
Pressure is another of the fundamental issues of Teacher’s room. That school becomes a pressure cooker where the tension ends up being unbearable and is transferred to the students. The film shows “the erosion of this profession.” “It has been a respected job, but it is no longer. Teachers are under a lot more pressure and parents think they know more than teachers because they read things on the internet. Add to that all those WhatsApp groups where a small thing can turn into a shit storm. This is the new world where teachers have to work. In Germany there is a shortage of 25,000 teachers. Nobody wants to do this job. They are overworked, underpaid and no one cares about them. Add to that the working hours. It doesn’t make any sense for school to start at eight in the morning. The only reason is that parents can leave their children to go to work and the economy works, but it is not the best time for them to learn,” he says critically.
In May he shoots his new film, but first he will go to Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremony, a nomination that surprised him for such a small film: “It’s crazy, we don’t have stars, there aren’t great production values, it’s a small story… but it’s great to see that you don’t need that much money for a film to resonate with the public.”
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