The White Ribbon

In a Protestant village in northern Germany in the year before the First World War, a schoolteacher narrates a sequence of disturbing incidents, accidents, punishments and acts of cruelty, whose source is never plainly named. The film observes the pastor, the doctor and the baron who hold authority and the children raised under their severe hand.

The film traces how repressive discipline, punished childhood and enforced shame become the seedbed of later cruelty, a study of the superego formed through humiliation. For a therapist it is a meditation on what harsh moral order does to a developing conscience. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2009.