The White Ribbon

The White Ribbon is set in a Protestant village in northern Germany in 1913 and 1914, on the eve of the First World War. An elderly tailor looks back on his years as the village schoolteacher and on a stretch of troubling events that shaped the community. A doctor is injured in a fall, a child is harmed, and fires claim lives; what might pass for accidents gradually takes on the character of deliberate, ritual punishment. The teacher, who leads the children's choir, begins to form suspicions about who is responsible, while the families around him, among them the baron, the pastor, the estate manager, the midwife and the farmers, carry on behind a respectable surface.

Michael Haneke wrote and directed the film, the twelfth of the fourteen features he has directed, following Funny Games and preceding Amour. Christian Friedel plays the schoolteacher, with Ernst Jacobi as his older voice, Leonie Benesch as Eva, Ulrich Tukur as the baron and Ursina Lardi as Marie Louise; the credited cast runs to eighty-four performers. Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka and Margaret Ménégoz produced the German-Austrian-Italian-Canadian-French co-production.

The film runs 144 minutes. Its budget of 22 million dollars was not recouped at the worldwide box office, which came to about 12 million. On IMDb it holds 7.8 out of 10 from roughly 81,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.5 from 1,183 votes, while film critics gave it 8.1 from 146 reviews.