The White Ribbon

In a small village in northern Germany, the year before the First World War begins, a series of strange events starts to unsettle everyone who lives there. The schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) is an old man now, telling the story of those months in a voice that does not hurry. Michael Haneke films it in black and white, and the film keeps returning to how harshly the village's children are raised, and how that harshness might have shaped what they became.