The White Ribbon
Das Seiße Band - Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte
Michael Haneke Season
A spellbinding tale of bigotry and brutality in a pre-Great War rural German community.
Das Seiße Band - Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte
Another profoundly disquieting but riveting film from Michael Haneke, filmed in lustrous and shimmering black and white.
In 1913, a series of malicious events and atrocities start to happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years before World War I, which seem to point to some kind of ritual punishment. Who is responsible?
At the heart of everything is the Lutheran pastor who insists on his children wearing a white ribbon for wrongdoings until their father is convinced they are cleansed. The white ribbon could of course be the ancestor of the Jewish yellow star. An air of mystery hangs over the film, with no explicit resolution.
The final long-held shot is a tableau of the villagers gathered in a small, bare church just after the outbreak of war, a portrait of a nation on the brink of history.
The film deservedly won the Palme d’Or in 2009.