The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2009 (Haneke's first, before Amour three years later) alongside the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the European Film Award for Best Film. Shot in stark monochrome over fourteen weeks in Saxony, the film took Haneke a decade of script development to bring to production.

A small Protestant village in northern Germany on the eve of the First World War. A series of mysterious incidents (a doctor thrown from a tripwire, a barn burned, a developmentally disabled child violently assaulted) disturbs the closed community. The schoolteacher (Christian Friedel, in his debut role) gradually comes to suspect the village's children themselves, in a slow and deliberately unresolved investigation. The Lutheran pastor (Burghart Klaußner) ties white ribbons on his children's arms as reminders of the purity they should aspire to and the shame of their failures.

Haneke has said in interviews that the film is partly about how the generation that became the perpetrators of the Nazi state was raised, that the white ribbon's coercive purity culture, the systemic violence within families, and the silence around abuse produced the cohort that came of age in the 1930s. Christian Berger's photography, the absence of a non-diegetic score, and the chillingly precise child performances combine into one of the most rigorous historical-causality films ever made.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Haneke's most ambitious work, and one of the few films to take seriously the question of how authoritarian generations are formed. A demanding, monumental, and finally indispensable work of European historical cinema.