Caché

Michael Haneke's Caché won Best Director at Cannes 2005 and the European Film Award for Best Film. It arrived between The Piano Teacher and The White Ribbon, in the middle of the period during which Haneke moved from confrontational provocateur to one of the most respected directors in European cinema. The film's central subject (France's wilful amnesia about the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters) was almost taboo in mainstream French film at the time.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil), a host of a literary television programme, and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) begin receiving anonymous VHS tapes showing prolonged surveillance footage of their Paris home, accompanied by childlike drawings of a bleeding throat. The investigation slowly drags Georges back into a buried childhood event involving a young Algerian boy whose parents had worked on his family's estate. Haneke withholds the source of the tapes throughout, and provocatively continues to withhold it past the credits.

The film's static long takes, the absence of non-diegetic music, the famous five-minute opening shot of a quiet street: every formal choice insists on the audience's complicity. Caché remains the definitive cinematic engagement with French postcolonial guilt, and a rare political film whose force comes entirely from what it refuses to show.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: A genuinely uncomfortable film about an uncomfortable subject, the kind that European art cinema is uniquely positioned to make. The opening shot alone is a master class in how attention itself can be the form.