Carla is new at the high school where she teaches maths and physical education. Her idealism annoys as well as amuses many of her seasoned (or should we say: emotionally dulled down) colleagues with whom she finds herself off and on at loggerheads – especially whenever talk comes to the institution’s desperate wokeness-by-numbers authoritarianism called Zero Tolerance policy. Things turn ugly when she first observes the way a case of theft gets handled, then starts to investigate on her own – only to find herself getting dragged into a maelstrom of bureaucratic self-denial and pupils knowing only too well how to play the school’s rigid policies…
On a stridently personal level, let me simply say this: When I watched The Teachers’ Lounge for the first time it felt like a documentary, an illustration of many a story I was told by a close friend who’s teaching at a high school – how the administration desperately tries to cover its ass, the way parents put pressure on the teachers… Çatak shows his genius in the way he transforms a seemingly singular case elegantly told in stridently realist terms into an investigation of structural oppression as such – making The Teachers’ Lounge a direct thematic precursor of Yellow Letters.
Olaf Möller