Thank you for the interpretation on the empty rooms. I was wondering about that and had not gotten that far. Also, I interpreted my own tension during the film as annoyance about all the characters, but your review put it back into perspective, I was just tense. Funny how that sometimes works.
I think what it shows in the end is that everyone will stand on their own believes weather u agree or not. The question is.. can you put yourself in their shoes and judge if you actions and believes where correct..... Who knows... Thats the end of things... A wide perspective in our heads and our personal opinion.
A little bit trivia: the movie was filmed in Hamburg Germany and the producer Ingo Fliess spent more than one year to create the script but could never get funding, it was finally made with the financial support of a close friend, in July 2022 the movie was finally listed for Berlinale Film Festival but still struggled finding the most fitted category(even turned down the invitation from TIFF). My personal take alongside the cynicism and exposure of the power abuse is that the failure of Ms. Nowak is actually the failure of the structuralism, as a math teacher she repeatedly said in her class that a corollary needs to be derived and proved step by step, but as an idealist she can not even validate her own identity. I think if the scene where Ms. Nowak saw people all wearing the same clothes were put at the end of the movie it would be more enlightening.
Gentlemen, as always thanks for your insights. I saw this at the Toronto International Film Festival 2023 along with another teacher themed film: Without Air and was blown away by both. High drama in the classroom and both films made me think that these days being a teacher is similar to walking through a minefield. It seems odd that these films are European; why aren’t there similar North American Films?
Moral responsibility. Everyone does actions they believe are correct. The journalists trick Carla for the “truth”, Carla records without consent trying to remedy the theft issue, Tom cheats so he doesn’t get in trouble, the parents defend their children such as Ali and Tom’s father complains about the homework, Oskar steals the laptop to defend his mother, the teacher that thinks he is right in interrogating the students at the beginning and they keep bringing that up because others see it as wrong. Then the Rubix Cube, when we have the problem in our hands we can mess it up further or we try to find the solutions
I have a master's degree in Education and I no longer work as a teacher, it's not worth it, anything you say, do, or don't do is going to offend some student, and you always end up in trouble. What surprises me about this movie is that a female teacher can get in trouble because of a student or students who got offended. In Mexico, if a male teacher says or does anything that makes a student feel humiliated, it is considered violence. But a female teacher can humiliate a student in many ways; whether with comments, accusations or shouting, but female teachers are not accused of violence for humiliating a student. I don't know Germany, but I like the idea that a female teacher can get in trouble just as much as a male teacher for making a student feel offended.
