Arts & Leisure

Movie review: Using film to ask the right questions

THE VERMONT PREMIERE of “The Teachers’ Lounge” will be screened as part of the MNFF’s year-round Cinema Selects Series — at 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 21, at the Middlebury Town Hall Theater.

“The Teachers’ Lounge” was one of this year’s Best Foreign Film nominees — though its closely observed drama set inside a contemporary seventh-grade German classroom could have easily been American.  The film’s protagonist, idealistic young teacher Carla Novak, is new to the school, but she soon finds herself pressured by other teachers to identify which of her students might be responsible for a series of thefts from the teachers’ lounge.