Michael Haneke is an Austrian director born in Munich, celebrated for austere, deliberately unsettling films that interrogate violence, media complicity, and bourgeois moral complacency. Funny Games, which he made twice, once in German and later shot for shot in English, used calculated, self-aware home-invasion horror to indict audiences' own appetite for screen violence. The Piano Teacher and Caché deepened his focus on repression and guilt within ostensibly respectable European society, the latter examining colonial-era violence resurfacing within a comfortable Parisian family. Amour, an unsparing account of an elderly husband caring for his dying wife, won the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, following The White Ribbon, which had also won the Palme d'Or. Haneke's icy formal control and consistent implication of his own audience in the violence he depicts have made him one of the most rigorously confrontational directors in contemporary European cinema. Read more