The White Ribbon (German: Das weiße Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) is a 2009 German-language mystery drama film, written and directed by Michael Haneke.

Released in black-and-white, the film offers a dark depiction of society and family in a northern German village just before World War I.

An unnamed elderly tailor narrates the parable, recounting events from a distant year in which he worked as a village schoolteacher and met his fiancée Eva, a nanny.

The setting is the fictitious Protestant village of Eichwald, Northern Germany, from July 1913 to 9 August 1914, where the local pastor, doctor and baron rule over the area's women, children and peasant farmers.

The puritanical pastor leads confirmation classes and gives his pubescent children a guilty conscience over apparently small transgressions.

Eventually, the schoolteacher's friendship with Eva, the baron's nanny, leads to a visit to her family home during a Christmas break; asking for her hand in marriage, he receives from her taciturn father a reluctant permission to marry, but only after a one-year test-period delay.

An overworked farmer's wife dies at the sawmill when rotten floorboards give way, after which his son symbolically destroys the baron's cabbage field.

The daughter of the steward at the baron's estate claims a violent dream-premonition about harm coming to the midwife's handicapped son, then the boy is attacked and almost blinded, found during a night search along with a well-written note quoting Exodus 20:5.

[12] The choice to make the film in black and white was based partly on the resemblance to photographs of the era, but also to create a distancing effect.

In some of the darkest scenes, where the crew had been forced to add artificial lighting, extra shadows could be removed in the digital post-production which allowed for extensive retouching.

[10] Critic Christian Buß suggested references in the name of the fictitious village, "Eichwald", to the Nazi Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Julia Evers of Oberösterreichische Nachrichten called the film "an oppressive and impressive moral painting, in which neither the audience nor the people in the village find an escape valve from the web of authority, hierarchy and violence.

Challenging accusations of Haneke's cinematic approach being cold and cynical, Keuschnigg instead hailed the director as uncompromising and sincerely humanistic.

[...] It might have been Bolshevism or any ideology that encourages blind devotion, that flatters people's vanity by telling them they're intelligent for not thinking and that they're virtuous for believing themselves better than their fellow citizens.

"[25] Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that trying to locate the seeds of fascism in religious hypocrisy and authoritarianism is "a simplistic notion, disturbing not in its surprise or profundity, but in the sadistic trouble the filmmaker has taken to advance it.

"[27] Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, writing, "The White Ribbon tells a simple story in a village about little people and suggests that we must find a balance between fear and security.

Martin Schweighofer, head of the Austrian Film Commission, expressed misgivings about the decision: "The discomfort arises because of the vague rules of the Academy.

It has been reported that the American distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, pressured Germany to submit it rather than Austria because the Academy had nominated Austrian films two years running and three in a row was considered unlikely.