Michael Haneke

The film that cemented the reputation of Michael Haneke (“The Piano Teacher”) shocked Cannes, then shocked cinemas, and changed for good how people think about screen violence. It still divides audiences, yet it opens innocently enough, with two very polite young men asking for some eggs. — A well-off couple and their young son head to their lakeside summer house for a quiet weekend, and soon two unusually polite young men knock at the door with a small favour to ask. The politeness wears off, but the visitors stay put. Murder is their hobby, and the family has just become this afternoon’s entertainment. — Official Selection - International Competition | Cannes Film Festival | 1997

Haneke won the Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his most tender film. Jean-Louis Trintignant (“Three Colours: Red”) and Emmanuelle Riva (“Hiroshima mon amour”) play a couple whose love has weathered everything, until it comes up against the one thing nothing and nobody can defeat. — Georges and Anne are retired music teachers in their eighties who have been together for decades and have lived in the same Paris flat for many years. Then one morning at breakfast, Anne stops in mid-sentence and stares blankly into space. From then on her memory begins to fade, taking with it the life the two of them have built together. — Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2013 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2012 Best Actress (Emmanuelle Riva) | BAFTA Awards | 2013 Best European Director | European Film Awards | 2013 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 2013 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2012

Haneke never explains why the world ended, and although he made this post-apocalyptic film in 2003, it catches something of the existential emptiness of our own time. Isabelle Huppert leads her children across fields and down roads, trading everything she has for a safe place to spend the night. — Anne and her husband bring their two children to a house in the French countryside, looking for shelter some time after a catastrophe nobody names, and find armed strangers inside. By nightfall the family is on the road along with the rest of the country. A silent boy begins to follow them, and Anne lets him. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2003 Official Selection | Toronto Film Festival | 2003

Haneke is as precise and devastating as ever in his third film, a mosaic of 71 moments from the lives of strangers in Vienna. At the centre of it is a nineteen-year-old who walks into a bank carrying a gun. — As 1993 draws to a close in Vienna, a Romanian boy sleeps on the streets, an old man phones his daughter to fill his day, a couple wait to adopt and a student is struggling with everything. They have never met. On the day before Christmas Eve, one of them walks into a bank armed. — Best Film | Chicago Film Festival | 1994

Haneke remade his own film shot for shot in English, with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, and for all its brutality it ends up as a manifesto against violence in cinema. Haneke isn’t doing this for pleasure. He’s doing it to ask why you came looking for it. — Ann and George arrive at their lake house with their son and the dog, and soon two polite young men appear at the door. One of them asks for some eggs, drops them and comes back for more. When George tells him to get out, the other one reaches for a golf club.

Two-time Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke directs Juliette Binoche and follows every consequence of one small cruelty, a piece of rubbish tossed into a beggar’s lap on a Paris street. His Europe is a Tower of Babel on the brink of collapse, where nobody quite manages to understand anyone else. — While her partner is away covering the war in Yugoslavia, an actress runs into his younger brother on a Paris street. Moments later the boy throws a crumpled paper bag into the lap of a woman who is begging there. A man whose parents emigrated from Mali tells him to pick it up. Then the police arrive. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2000 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2000

Michael Haneke wouldn’t start shooting until he had Isabelle Huppert, and she is the piano teacher at the heart of his shattering adaptation of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. She has locked every feeling away, until a student comes along who is determined to find the key. — Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna conservatory, where she is merciless with her students, and spends her evenings in the flat she shares with her strict mother. She is lonely, and her sexuality finds its outlet in voyeurism and the video booths of porn shops. Then Walter Klemmer, a gifted young student, begins to court her, and Erika tells him exactly what she wants. — Grand Prize of the Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2001 Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert) | Cannes Film Festival | 2001 Best Actor (Benoît Magimel) | Cannes Film Festival | 2001

Michael Haneke went looking for the roots of fascism and won the Palme d’Or, a Golden Globe and many other awards. In a Protestant village in early 20th-century Germany, accident after accident looks less like chance, nobody will say who is behind them, and the children know more than they let on. — A year before the First World War, the doctor of a Protestant village in northern Germany is thrown when his horse trips on a wire strung across the road. More accidents follow, with no explanations, and though suspicion falls on the villagers, nobody is willing to talk. All the while the village children are watching, and they may know more than the adults are prepared to admit. — Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2010 Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2010 Golden Palm | Cannes Film Festival | 2009 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 2010 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2009

Haneke took the story for his debut from a short newspaper report and was already in full control, turning it into a thriller and a satire on consumerism about a family that methodically dismantles its own life. The horror here doesn’t lurk in the shadows but happens in broad daylight. — Georg is an engineer, Anna works as an optician and their daughter Eva is an ordinary schoolgirl, and every morning runs to the same unbroken routine. Then one day Eva tells her class she has gone blind. It isn’t true, but her mother’s response is a surprising one, and cracks start to show in the middle-class facade. Over the next three years the family pulls away from everyone, and in the end from one another. — Ernest Artaria Award | Locarno Film Festival | 1989

In 1961 the Paris police killed Algerian demonstrators and France denied it for forty years, and on that silence Michael Haneke built a thriller that won him Best Director at Cannes. A well-off family finds tapes of their own house on the doorstep. Don’t switch off until the end credits are over. — Georges, who hosts a television programme about books and lives comfortably in Paris, finds a videotape at his door holding hours of footage of the front of his own house. More arrive, wrapped in children’s drawings. Someone wants him to remember something. — Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 2005 FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2005 Best European Film | European Film Awards | 2005 Best European Directori | European Film Awards | 2005 Best European Actor (Daniel Auteuil) | European Film Awards | 2005