The Teachers' Lounge

İlker Çatak's The Teachers' Lounge (German: Das Lehrerzimmer) earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 96th ceremony in March 2024, Germany's submission for the prize. It dominated the 2023 German Film Awards (Lolas) with the top four prizes: Best Fiction Film, Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role for Leonie Benesch and Best Screenplay (for Çatak with co-writer Johannes Duncker). It also won the Lux Audience Award at the European Film Awards 2024 (the prize given by audience vote across the European Parliament.

The lead, Leonie Benesch) already established through The White Ribbon (Haneke, 2009) and the Netflix series Babylon Berlin, gave the most internationally visible performance of her career to date in this film. She would go on the same year to win the Lola for Best Supporting Actress in Tim Fehlbaum's September 5, an unusual back-to-back recognition. The breakthrough child performance is by Leonard Stettnisch, in his screen debut.

The film was shot in a real school in Hamburg over a tightly compressed schedule of approximately twenty-eight days. Cinematography is by Judith Kaufmann, who had also shot Şeyhmus Saatçi's earlier projects; the score is by Marvin Miller. Çatak (German-Turkish, born in Berlin and trained at the Hamburg Media School) has continued to work in this German-naturalist register; The Teachers' Lounge is now widely treated as the foundational entry in his international career and one of the most accomplished German features of the 2020s.