The White Ribbon

Written & Directed by: Michael Haneke
Full credits from IMDb

And that little boy grew up to be…Hermann Goering? The Teutonic, toe-headed tots, tykes and teens that occupy the edges of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band), a cold-eyed, cynical and misanthropic whodunit set in the run-up to W.W. I, presumably grow up to become Hitler-heiling adults; Haneke’s film, then, examines how capacities for cruelty, violence and antipathy (of National Socialist proportions!) are formed, as well as who, or what, is to blame for churning out such adorable lil’ monsters.

Filmed in a sharply focused black and white that suggests easy moral clarity, with vivid period details that extend down to the haircuts, the movie chronicles a series of malicious and mostly mysterious incidents that befall a German farming village between 1913 and 1914...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine.


Watch the trailer: