The Austrian director of German origin studied philosophy and psychology, staged plays on radio, theater and television. His first film, The Seventh Continent (1988), won the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. In 1992, Michael Haneke's "Bernie's Videotapes" created a sensation at Cannes, although it was shown out of competition. Haneke would later receive the European Critics' Felix Award for this film. The director raised a new wave of noise around his work by performing at the fiftieth anniversary Cannes Film Festival - already in competition - with “Funny Games”.

Haneke is not the first to explore the nature of violence. And he was probably not the first to guess that not every perversion and psychosis can be explained according to Freud, by referring to animal instincts, living conditions, or falling into mysticism. However, Haneke has no equal in how to present unmotivated violence. There is no need for a European director, like the Americans after Tarantino, to pour streams of cranberry juice from the screen and torment good people for a long time before the heroes finally restore justice and come to a happy ending through mountains of corpses. Instead, an experienced TV producer elegantly plays out the murders in the scenery of a sweet home series about dad, mom, son and respectable neighbors living somewhere in a picturesque area. Against such a simple and clear background, the cruelty of what is happening is even more obvious and truly frightening.

Haneke apparently wanted this. Unlike, say, Claude Chabrol, who also loves to breed devils in quiet pools, the Austrian’s far-fetched passions do not boil. Only a slight irritation smolders over the obvious stupidity of the victims, and the nature of evil is so mysterious that it involuntarily arouses interest. You can’t insure yourself against this, you can only avoid bumping into it and thus avoid it.

Faces of the festival: Michael Haneke