Carla meets other kinds of discrimination; there is a widespread prejudice in Germany against Poles as thieves, says Catak. When a colleague speaks to her in Polish, she pointedly replies in German; Catak says he has had a similar experience with a Turkish colleague who refused to speak to him in their shared language, even if they were the only people in the room.

“I was kind of bugged by that,” he says. “There’s a bunch of things, identity-wise, that have made their way into the film. Both Johannes and I have this slight feeling of alienation, as well as a will to show everyone else we are one of them. I remember using sophisticated language in my youth to say ‘look, I may look different, but I’m actually German’.”

The point of the film is not to establish who stole the missing money. “The moment you give that away, everything falls apart because the audience is no longer confronted with their own judgement,” says Catak.

“Because then you say ‘that person has done it and now we can go home: the world is fixed again’. And for me, this is not what film should be about. Film to me should be about holding a mirror up to the audience.

“One thing that we questioned a lot was this attitude of people claiming the moral high ground. I think Carla is doing that as well. She could be talking to these other teachers, saying she doesn’t like what they’re doing, but we have this issue in our time where everyone feels they are on the right side of history. It comes down to the search for truth, which has become very elusive and hard to pinpoint. You could see that in the pandemic, people were like ‘right, depending which source I pick, I’ll get vaccinated or not’. That’s not about facts, it’s about belief.”

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At the same time, he says, he realised while making the film what a tough job teachers have. “The stuff they have to go through, nowadays especially, is unbelievable. There is a reason why there is a lack of teachers in Germany: we are 25,000 teachers short, because nobody wants to pick up this profession any more. These teachers are unpaid and overworked. And parents are often not aware; they are often very quick to criticise.”

He had 23 young actors in his fictional classroom, picked at exhaustive auditions. “I really adored being their teacher and director - and them being my teachers also, because it was just so refreshing to be in a discussion with so many young, hungry-for-life, interested little human beings,” he says.

When it came to the crunch, however, he was quite capable of pulling rank in a way his fictional headmistress might have appreciated.

“When you deal with kids they are like ‘what are we having for lunch, how many more takes do we need to do?’,” he says. “There was this one moment I was a little stressed out and thought I needed to say something, because they got to me.

So I said ’OK, listen up! This is the truth. We’re all going to die. But this film will be around. Your kids and grand-kids will see it. So you better make sure you deliver your best performance, because you don’t want to be ashamed of what you just did.” He pauses. “I think they got the idea.”

The Teachers’ Lounge opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, April 25.