(2009, b/w; Das Weiße Band: Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte, German) Beginning in July 1912, a number of mysterious incidents occurred in a small village of northern Germany, though the aged narrator (voice of Ernst Jacobi) says he can't be entirely certain of the truth of his report because some of what he has to relate is based on hearsay or has been obscured by the passage of time, leaving unanswered questions.

Thirty-one at the time, he was the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) on the estate of the Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the Baroness (Ursina Lardi) where shortly before his making the acquaintance of Eva (Leonie Benesch) - the Baroness's new 17-year-old nanny from the nearby village of Treglitz, whose shy but frank personality would grip his heart - the initial incident involves the doctor (Rainer Bock), a wire strung taut across the road, tripping the local physician's horse and breaking his collarbone in the fall.

No one admits to having seen or perpetrated the offense; but in the home of the Protestant pastor (Burghart Klaussner), the puritanical father of several children punishes his oldest pubescent son Martin (Leonard Proxauf) and daughter Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) for a minor misdemeanor by requiring them to wear a white ribbon as reminder of innocence and purity; he also ties Martin's hands to the bed frame at night after coercing a confession of the boy's masturbating. When the teacher witnesses Martin walking precariously across a bridge, he demands to know the cause for the boy's reckless conduct: God won't allow him to die, replies Martin, who begs the teacher not to report the occurrence to his father.

Another incident, however, draws attention away from the first: a woman is killed in an accident at the sawmill; in an act of revenge her son Max Felder takes his scythe to the Baron's cabbage garden during the harvest festival at the end of summer. Then in the evening of the thanksgiving celebration, the Baroness's son Sigi (Fion Mutert) is found strung upside down inside the sawmill, having been caned.

We have here in director Michael Haneke's documentary-like dramatization (for which he was responsible for both story and screenplay) another Village of the Damned (the 1960 British science-fiction film, also shot in black-and-white, by German director Wolf Rilla) in which the fantastical features of the children's mental powers have been replaced by psychological and sociological elements, which will produce emotionally-damaged middleclass adults for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, capable of carrying out the Nazi horrors (Karla snips off the head of her father's pet bird with a pair of scissors, leaving it for him to see on his desk) against the despised ruling class and the handicapped.

Even though the Baron, who is respected, while addressing everyone in the church pleads for someone to come forth, reminding his farm workers that other children are at risk if the culprit is not found out and punished, as before no one admits to doing or seeing anything. Mutual suspicions arise; Eva and the tutor are fired for lack of attention to Sigi, though as Eva explains to the teacher (who attempts to intercede on her behalf without success) - "I haven't done anything wrong" - she was responsible solely for the Baroness's twins.

After a lengthy recuperation in a distant hospital, the doctor, a widower, returns home to his 14-year-old daughter Anna (Roxane Duran) and four-year-old son Rudolph (Miljan Chatelain), who behaves strangely toward him; he takes sexual advantage of his widowed housekeeper and receptionist, Mrs Wagner (Susanne Lothar), a midwife with a retarded young son Karli, while cruelly insulting her.

Following Christmas - the teacher visits Eva and her parents in Treglitz - in the aftermath of the estate's barn's catching fire at night, Max's father (who refused to grant his son forgiveness) hangs himself. In April the Baroness returns from a lengthy sojourn in Italy with her three children, bearing ill-tidings that will upset her husband at the same time that news arrives of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.

Before the outbreak of war, poor little Karli is tortured; the steward's daughter Erna (Janina Fautz) tells the teacher of having dreamt of this very act, as well as previously dreaming of her brothers Ferdinand (Theo Trebs) and Georg's (Enno Trebs) trying to kill their infant sibling. Finally the Baron calls for the police to investigate; the chief inspector interrogates Erna: "I've got other ways to make you talk." When certain residents of the village mysteriously depart from a community plagued with malice, envy, brutality, perversion, and revenge, the villagers cast their suspicions upon them.

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