White Ribbon, The

Foreign Language DVDs

$29.95

SKU: 043396343535 Sony Pictures

The White Ribbon dvd - Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte - 2009 award-winning German film directed by Michael Haneke. This great German movie - winner of the 2009 Golden Globe award for best foreign film and nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film and best cinematography is a fascinating mystery. From July, 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents take place in a 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; another sexually abuses his daughter. 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? Are the children holy innocents? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world; the center cannot hold. The worries and the dramas of the village are soon lost in the strange excitement of the coming war. Later, the schoolteacher ponders over it again: didn't those events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed? Weren't the barbaric acts of the children, deep down, the natural consequences of what they had been taught? Stars Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi, Leonie Benesch and Ulrich Tukur. Rated R for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality. German audio with optional English subtitles, 114 minutes.