Dr Douglas Smith, Head of French and Francophone Studies, UCD School of Languages and Literatures will introduce this screening.

Directed by Michael Haneke, whose new film Love opens this year’s Festival, Hidden is an intense and unsettling meditation on trust, guilt, and the paranoia inherent in the latter. Television presenter Georges (Daniel Auteuil), who lives with wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their twelve-year-old son, receives packages containing surreptitiously filmed videotapes of himself and his family, and disturbing drawings that may relate to an incident from Georges’ childhood. However, his attempts to discover the source of the tapes lead to a Kafkaesque nightmare. A film of enigma and ambiguity, it challenges the viewer to draw one’s own conclusions, which may prove its most discomfiting quality.

Director’s Note: Spectator turns voyeur from the very first shot. The performances by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are superb.

Winner: Best Director, Cannes 2005

This film is screening as part Les Films du Losange 50th Anniversary programme. This programme consists of three parts: Part One is showing in October, Part Two concerns the work of Éric Rohmer while Part Three (which includes this screening) will run as a strand of 2012 IFI French Film Festival.