The Piano Teacher

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

The film is adapted from Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 novel of the same name; Jelinek, an Austrian writer who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 (the announcement coming three years after the film's release and partly attributed by the Swedish Academy to Haneke's adaptation extending her international reach), had drawn the central material from her own decade of music-conservatory training in Vienna and her relationship with her mother. Jelinek did not adapt the novel herself; the screenplay is by Haneke alone.

The cast pairs Huppert and Magimel — Magimel was Huppert's real-life partner at the time of shooting and they have a daughter together — with Annie Girardot, in her last major screen role, playing the mother. Cinematography is by Christian Berger, Haneke's regular collaborator since the early 1990s. The film was shot largely on location in Vienna, including extensive use of the Wiener Konzerthaus and the city's Conservatory. The French co-production financing was the structural shift that allowed Haneke to leave the strictly Austrian-financed early-career mode of The Seventh Continent and Funny Games behind; from this film forward all his major productions would be French/Austrian/German co-productions.