The Piano Teacher

Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (French: La Pianiste) took three of the four major prizes at Cannes 2001: the Grand Prix (the festival's second-highest honour), Best Actress for Isabelle Huppert and Best Actor for Benoît Magimel. Very few films in the festival's history have won three of the top four at a single edition, and the haul settled Haneke's standing as the central Austrian filmmaker of his generation, alongside Ulrich Seidl.

The source is Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 novel of the same name, which drew on her own decade of music-conservatory training in Vienna and on her relationship with her mother. Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, three years after the film's release. She did not adapt the novel herself; the screenplay is Haneke's alone.

Huppert and Magimel are joined by Annie Girardot, in her last major screen role, as the mother. Christian Berger, Haneke's regular cinematographer since the early 1990s, shot it largely on location in Vienna, with extensive use of the Wiener Konzerthaus and the city's Conservatory. French co-production money is what let Haneke leave behind the strictly Austrian financing of early films like The Seventh Continent and Funny Games. Every major production he made after this one was a French, Austrian and German co-production.