Michael Haneke

Known for: Amour (2012), The White Ribbon (2009)

Michael Haneke worked in Austrian television for more than two decades before directing his first feature, developing a cinema of deliberate discomfort that implicates the audience in the violence it witnesses. Funny Games (1997), The Piano Teacher (2001), and Caché (2005) are exercises in formal cruelty as moral argument. The White Ribbon (2009) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes; Amour (2012) won both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.