The White Ribbon (15)

2009 Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Canada

Dir. Michael Haneke

“It’s the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I’ll have to pass.”

So said Michael Haneke, the director whose extraordinary filmography is being released in a major retrospective from Curzon. We’d love to show more of his multi award-winning films but we’ve picked two of the best to end our spring season – each quite different from the other but both with his trade-mark ability to keep us guessing.

First The White Ribbon, next week Hidden

From July 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents takes place in a puritanical Protestant German village: A horse trips on a wire and throws the rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron’s son is hung upside down in a mill; parents slap and bully their children; a man is cruel to his long-suffering lover; People disappear.

A callow teacher who courts a nanny in the baron’s household narrates the story and tries to investigate the connections among these accidents and crimes. What is foreshadowed? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world. The White Ribbon was winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and a Golden Globe.

Tickets £5 (£1 child/student) available on the door or in advance from the Buxton Opera House box-office