"The Teachers’ Lounge" chronicles a tense, complex middle-school crisis

German director İlker Çatak scrutinizes the unraveling in microcosm of an entire community in “The Teachers’ Lounge.” Racism, institutional bureaucracy, and principled positions fuel heated personal and professional interaction after a Turkish student is falsely accused of theft, his classmates are asked to confirm or refute the accusation, and compassionate, idealistic teacher Carla Nowak seeks the real thief.

A new hire from Poland, Carla instigates an unanticipated incident that propels the unraveling of her academic world. Though “The Teachers’ Lounge” takes place entirely in a German middle school, important for the pressure cooker atmosphere, the implications for society at large become increasingly clear. At the Telluride Film Festival where I first saw the film, director Çatak says he explicitly intended this parallel. Prejudice, degrees of power, investigative journalism, and debate over responsibility versus individual rights all factor into events.

The twenty-three twelve and thirteen year-old children, all nonprofessional actors, and the diverse, supporting actors deliver realistic, complicated emotions and physical reactions. But above all, this astute film depends on the brilliant Leonie Benesch as Carla who must traverse a minefield. Charged incidents involve colleagues, office staff, a principal, parents, young journalists, and, especially, the affected students, expanding to the entire school population. Emotions are raw, driving good and bad choices, almost all with understandable motives. That no villains take center stage makes this immensely complicated negotiation of responsibility, blame, and guilt both believable and unnerving.

Inspired by actual events in co-writers Çatak and Johannes Duncker’s school days in Istanbul, their straightforward interrogation reveals the conflicting allegiances and tangled values that motivate everyone, viewers included, to contemplate assumptions, even with the best of motives, and decisions that ripple through a shattered community. Winner of the German Golden Lola for the year’s best film, Germany’s official submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, “The Teachers’ Lounge” is primarily in German, with some Turkish, Polish, and English, all with English subtitles.