The White Ribbon

The White Ribbon is a 2009 German-language mystery drama film, written and directed by Michael Haneke. Released in black-and-white, the film offers a dark depiction of society and family in a northern German village just before World War I. According to Haneke, The White Ribbon "is about the roots of evil. Whether it's religious or political terrorism, it's the same thing." The film premiered at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in May 2009 where it won the Palme d'Or, followed by positive reviews and several other major awards, including the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film also received two nominations at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2009: Best Foreign Language Film (representing Germany) and Best Cinematography (Christian Berger). Plot The memories of an unnamed elderly tailor form a parable from the distant year he worked as a village schoolteacher and met his fiancée Eva, a nanny. The setting is the fictitious Protestant village of Eichwald, Northern Germany, from July 1913 to 9 August 1914, where the local pastor, the doctor and the baron rule the roost over the area's women, children and peasant farmers. The puritanical pastor leads confirmation classes and gives his pubescent children a guilty conscience over apparently small transgressions. He has them wear white ribbons as a reminder of the innocence and purity from which they have strayed. When under interrogation, his son confesses to 'impure' touching; the pastor has the boy's hands tied to his bed frame each night. The doctor, a widower, treats the village children kindly but humiliates his housekeeper (the local midwife, with whom he is having sexual relations) and also sexually abuses his teenage daughter. The baron, who is the lord of the manor, underwrites harvest festivities for the villagers, many of them his farm workers. After his young son is abusively injured by unknown assailant(s), he summarily dismisses Eva for no apparent reason, yet defends the integrity of a farmer whose son in a symbolic act has destroyed the baron's field of cabbages.