Palme d’Or (Best Film), Cannes Film Festival 2009
Best Foreign Language Film, Golden Globes 2010

Michael Haneke’s meticulously executed drama of life in a German small-town ahead of World War I proves one of the year’s most intensely absorbing and haunting movie experiences. It is also one of the most acclaimed and debated.

"While Tarantino was busy romanticizing the downfall of German fascism, Michael Haneke set about exploring its roots in The White Ribbon, a masterful sociological drama that brought the Austrian filmmaker (who previously won Cannes’ Grand Jury Prize for The Piano Teacher and Best Director for Hidden) his long-overdue Palme d’Or. The setting is a rural German village during the year lead-up to World War I, where the local schoolteacher comes to believe that a rash of deadly accidents befalling the townsfolk may be the work of one or more of his eerily withdrawn, stoic pupils…
Less conceptual and more novelistic in structure than Hidden… this disturbing, challenging and austerely beautiful film (shot in forbidding black-and-white) methodically works its way through a dense, multi-character narrative while refining the director’s trademark concerns about society’s hidden violence and the evils transmitted from parents to children. As usual in Haneke’s films, guilt is a communal rather than individual affliction, human decency a fragile flame flickering in the gale. For these reasons and more, Haneke has always been too bitter a pill for some audiences to swallow, but The White Ribbon reaffirms him as the leading European filmmaker of his generation. It feels like a classic even as you are watching it for the first time.” — Scott Foundas, LA Weekly

“Michael Haneke achieves a new refinement of mastery and audacity… This is a profoundly disquieting movie, superbly acted and directed. Its sinister riddle glitters more fiercely each time I watch it.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A subtle, understated, precise and marvellously resonant recreation of rural Germany on the eve of an epochal war… It may be Haneke’s finest yet – and will hopefully lay to rest clichés about his being a ‘cold’ film-maker.” — Geoff Andrew, Sight and Sound