(DAS WEISSE BAND – EINE DEUTSCHE KINDERGESCHICHTE)

An ageing schoolteacher recounts the disturbing events that took place in the rural Protestant community of his youth; a doctor is injured in a tripwire accident, a farmer’s wife dies in a sawmill mishap, a boy is tied up and beaten in the woods. The villagers, bound by rigid social structures and moral absolutism, struggle to explain the growing violence. Suspicion begins to fall on the town’s children, who wear white ribbons as symbols of purity and obedience and have been raised in an atmosphere of strict discipline. A deserving winner of the Palme D’or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, Haneke’s characteristically austere drama can be read as an allegory for the origins of Nazism.

Notes by David O’Mahony.

Screening as part of Complicit: The Films of Michael Haneke.