Wheelchair accessible, English subtitling
Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival is proud to present the UK premiere of The Staffroom (Zbornica) as the closing screening of its inaugural edition in 2022. Croatian writer/director Sonja Tarokić's first feature film, The Staffroom is a brilliantly shot and fantastically acted work. Earlier last year, it has been featured in the line-up of the Karlovy Vary 2021 Crystal Globe Competition.
Anamarija starts a new job as a counsellor at a secondary school — a place full of petty conflicts and cliques among the teaching staff — and is immediately required to deal with several interlocked conflicts and PR nightmares. Initially, she tries to stay out of the power struggles of the headmistress, the teachers, and the parents, and dedicate her time to the children. But as she grows more familiar with the system, Anamarija begins taking charge in the staffroom.
Content notes: Depictions of bullying, harassment, sexism, alcoholism, and mild violence.
Access notes: Bright colours and images, loud sounds (music and vocals from the soundtrack).
Curated by Ilia Ryzhenko
Director’s Statement
The idea for this film was … influenced by the fact that I have grown up in a family of psychologists and have been surrounded by their stories about the social system all my life. [The] school is a specific system in which people often spend their whole life within the same group of colleagues in the same staffroom, closely connected by friendships, opinions and prejudices. A teaching job is one of the hardest jobs in our society: educational workers are responsible for the children they work with and [the] specific problems they encounter daily, but at the same time they also have the symbolic duty of passing on the moral values that later define us subconsciously. For that reason I have always seen the staffroom as a symbol of the community in general, and I wanted to present it as a chatty, cyclic apparatus ridden with tensions. That is why in this film we move almost in circles through … the same school spaces, surrounded by a hubbub of voices that never really stops and thus makes the atmosphere more and more feverish and emotionally charged. Such a concrete, culturally loaded environment essentially gave me a story about maturing, about a young woman who has to accept that she is neither stronger nor nobler than the people around her.
Director’s biography
Sonja Tarokić (Zagreb, 1988) has an MA degree in film directing and a BA degree in literature. She is the author of several short films. On Shaky Ground (2014),a dissection of a Mediterranean family that goes through the breakdown of its paterfamilias, was screened at Rotterdam IFF and awarded the best Croatian short at Zagreb Film Festival, while her other films (You Bitch!, I’m a Self Made Woman, Smart Girls, Red) were screened and awarded at numerous international festivals, such as Sarajevo FF, Vila do Conde, Angers Premiers Plans, NEXT Bucharest FF, Brief Encounters FF. She participated at CPH:Lab and Sarajevo Talent Campus workshops. The Staffroom is her first feature film, which was developed through TorinoFilmLab Script&Pitch 2015 and FrameWork 2016 program, winning the TFL Production Award.