Video and trailer from Cannes, The White Ribbon film winner.
Film fans and critics take their cinema very seriously, and many of the winners of last nights Cannes Film festival were met with jeers and boos, with a number of top awards coming out of left field, the reactiosn announcements were closer to a European football match than a film ceremony.
The top prize Palme d'Or, or the Golden Palm, went to director Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, a pre World War 2 Germany drama.
The White Ribbon was shot in black and white following a Childrens chior and depicting life in a village in northern Germany comes with an uncompromising moral point-of-view, Reuters says.
According to dirctror of White Ribbon Michael Haneke, the film is about "the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature."
Reuters says The White Ribbon :Is a superb cinematic work and an appropriately serious one, given its subject matter and its intentions.
The film is narrated by its central character, a young teacher, decades after the events depicted. Though the many children all have names, the adults, further extending the film's symbolic implications, tend to be known mostly through their generic roles, e.g., the Baron, the Pastor, the Farmer, the Doctor, and so on.
Life in the village is strictly hierarchical, and everyone knows his or her place. An inhuman, never questioned moral code holds sway, especially over the children who are constantly punished, both physically and psychologically, for the slightest infraction.
The women are similarly brutalized and under the thumb of the village's unabashed patriarchy. The male adults, on the other hand, engage in clandestine acts of evil and cruelty that are kept hushed up.
One day the order of things begins to unravel. First, the doctor, on horseback, is tripped up by an invisible wire and his injuries put him in the hospital for months. Then several children, including the son of the Baron and the retarded child of the doctor's mistress, are severely beaten.
Later, the Baron's barn is set on fire. Who are the guilty ones? It is the teacher who finally figures out, to the surprise of no one, that it is the children that are wreaking the havoc, partly out of revenge for their mistreatment, and partly because they have so totally internalized the sick values of their parents.
On a more symbolic level, though Haneke is too much the serious artist to spell it out, it's clear that this portrait of a sick society is meant to explain, at least partially, the horrendous war that breaks out at the very end of the film, and the fascism that quickly followed in its wake.
Other awards at Cannes film festival last night:
Palme d'Or- "The White Ribbon" (Michael Haneke, Germany-France-Austria-Italy)
Grand Prix- "A Prophet" (Jacques Audiard, France)
Lifetime achievement award- Alain Resnais, "Wild Grass" (France)
Director- Brillante Mendoza ("Kinatay," France-Philippines)
Jury prize- "Fish Tank" (Andrea Arnold, U.K.), "Thirst" (Park Chan-wook, South Korea-U.S.)
Actor- Christoph Waltz, "Inglourious Basterds" (U.S.-Germany)
Actress- Charlotte Gainsbourg, "Antichrist" (Denmark-Germany-France-Sweden-Italy-Poland)
Screenplay- Mei Feng, "Spring Fever" (Hong Kong-France)
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