YELLOW TICKET | Omeleto Drama

A teacher challenges his students.


Mr. Valentine teaches literature at a bilingual high school in Poland; today is his last lesson as a teacher before he assumes the new position of principal. His students are, by and large, wealthy and well-off -- the future elite of the country. But they are also cynical, blase and obsessed with their phones, and Mr. Valentine lays into them about using A.I. for writing their assigned essays.

The teacher does his best to get through to his students, teaching a lesson on Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and how his work anticipated the rise of perilous ideologies in Russia. But when they fail to engage with the lesson, he takes drastic measures to grab their attention.

Directed and written by Piotr Toczynski, this short drama explores the strenuous efforts of a teacher to truly educate his students. Not just teach them facts or even ideas, but engage with the material to expand their understanding of humanity and the world. It's a tall order, especially in an age where students automate their learning, curiosity and efforts to algorithms and A.I. tools. But Mr. Valentine is impassioned and determined -- a fervor that causes him to take his methods to an extreme.

Told with dynamic camerawork and lucid yet slightly shadowy cinematography, the centerpiece of the narrative is Mr. Valentine's attempt to teach Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and its examination of the moral ills of Russian society. But even though corruption is still at Poland's doorstep even today, the students still see the required reading as dull and refuse to put any effort into their work, leaning on A. I. to do their homework. So Mr. Valentine takes a different tactic with his lesson, vividly acting out a key scene from the novel, in which a prostitute is forced to carry a yellow ticket and suffers shame and judgment for her line of work, which she does to keep her family out of poverty.

Mr. Valentine then demands his students write a response on its themes, but when he realizes none of his students have even read the text, he is infuriated. As the teacher, actor Rene Zagger offers an impassioned, fierce turn as an educator who fervently believes in his mission but is dismayed and then enraged by the growing detachment of his students. He knows what he is teaching -- and the discussion it should engender -- has relevance more than ever, but his students are too removed and absorbed to pay attention, much less care. So he decides to wake them up with a drastic, even dangerous gesture.

Intellectually engaged and provocative, YELLOW TICKET builds up to a genuinely suspenseful place as Mr. Valentine does everything in his power to pierce the fog of apathy and even hostility that he faces in the classroom. His final choice will no doubt have consequences on his future as a teacher and perhaps even affect his post as principal, a thread that may be explored in the short's future feature version. But in this ending, at the very least, Mr. Valentine has delivered a lesson his students will never forget.


YELLOW TICKET. Courtesy of Piotr Toczynski at https://toczynski.bio.link.