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Michael Haneke was born on March 23 1942 in Munich. The son of actors Fritz Haneke and Beatrix von Degenschild was raised in Vienna, where he graduated from school and began studying philosophy, psychology and drama.
In 1967, he quit university before completing his studies and moved to Baden-Baden, working as a TV producer for the Südwestfunk. There, he also finished his first – yet never filmed – screenplay "Wochenende". At the beginning of the 1970s, he switched to the theatre and subsequently directed plays in numerous cities – among them Baden-Baden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main and Munich –and also worked at the Wiener Burgtheater.
In 1973, Haneke directed his first television film "...und was kommt danach?", followed by other, often memorable TV productions like "Sperrmüll" (1976), "Lemminge" (1979) "Fraulein" (1985), "Nachruf für einen Mörder“ (1991) and the Kafka adaptation "Das Schloss" ("The Castle", 1997).
His cinema debut came in 1989 with "Der Siebente Kontinent" ("The Seventh Continent"). Initially planned to be made for the small screen, the award-winning and aesthetically focused film depicts the collective suicide of a small family. According to Haneke, it marked the beginning of a trilogy dedicated to the ongoing "Glaciation of Feelings", which was continued with "Benny's Video" (1992): In the film, a young boy kills his girlfriend and films himself during the act, thereby establishing a theme resonating in many of Haneke's following works: The confrontation with – and dissection of – mediated representations of violence. The trilogy culminated with "71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls" ("71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance", 1994), which chronicles the murder spree of a student.
In 1997, Haneke further reflected on violence in mainstream cinema with his antagonizing meta-thriller "Funny Games": While on vacation, a couple – played by Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar – and their son are taken hostage by two seemingly unmotivated youths who force the terrified family to participate in a deadly power game. The senseless suffering of the nuclear family triggers a radical critique of audience expectations. More subdued, but equally interested in deconstructing the notion of the bourgeois subject and the subversion of narrative conventions was Haneke's French production "Code inconnu". "Die Klavierspielerin" ("The Piano Teacher", 2000), an adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's eponymous work, marked Haneke's international breakthrough: The provoking and powerful drama starring Isabelle Huppert won the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes. Haneke next directed the apocalyptic "Wolfzeit" ("Time of the Wolf", 2003), before scoring another European success with the existentialist crime drama "Caché", which won him the Best Director Award in Cannes and also swept the European Film Awards.
Apart from his own works as director and author, Haneke has been teaching film at the Wiener Filmakademie since 2002. He also debuted as an opera director, staging Mozart's "Don Giovanni" in Paris in 2006. In 2008, the worldwide renowned auteur – who lives in Vienna with his wife – completed the international co-production "Funny Games U. S.", a star-studded, shot-by-shot remake of his original 1997 film.
His next project, "Das weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte" ("The White Ribbon", 2009) was filmed in black-and-white images and is situated on the brink of World War I. The film tells the parabolic story of mysterious incidents in a village in northern Germany. "Das weiße Band" already won several awards, including the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival and the award as "Film of the year" of FIPRESCI, the international federation of film critics. Haneke himself was awarded the CineMerit Award at the 2009 Munich film festival for his extraordinary contributions to motion pictures as an art form. In 2010, "Das weiße Band" won a Golden Globe, was nominated twice for the Oscars® and won ten German Film Awards.
Two years later another triumph followed: Haneke's drama "Liebe" ("Love") was invited to the Cannes competition, received rave reviews and was awarded the Golden Palm. The intimate drama deals with a couple in their eighties, whose love is severely tested when the woman suffers a stroke. It opened in cinemas in the late summer of 2012 and continued to garner numerous awards, including five Césars, four European Film Awards, the Golden Globe and the Academy Award® for Best Picture in a Foreign Language.
Once again in Cannes, Michael Haneke's next film "Happy End" premiered in May 2017, highlighting the deterioration of a bourgeois family in Calais against the backdrop of the refugee crisis.