Audiences will have to wait another year to see the latest film by Austrian master Michael Haneke, who has returned to Europe after directing the US remake of Funny Games.

Shooting on his new project Das Weisse Band (“The White Tape”) is set to start in June and continue throughout the summer. Certain scenes will be shot in winter and the film should be ready for release in April 2009.

This project marks a real return to the director’s roots, as it is the first German-language feature by Haneke since the original Funny Games (1997). "The subject matter requires it", the director told Le Film Français.
The film – which once again explores the cruelty at the heart of the director’s work, here in the form of ritual punishment – is set in a school in the German countryside in 1913, before the rise of Nazism. Haneke looks at the educational system that prepared the way for an entire generation’s descent into fascist ideology, a subject and era that have not yet been tackled in film, as the director is keen to point out.

Haneke wrote the film for his late friend Ulrich Mühe, the outstanding star of The Lives of Others [trailer, film focus], with whom he had worked on three previous occasions. The director thus had to recruit another actor to star alongside Susanne Lothar, who is one of Haneke’s loyal collaborators (she played Mühe’s wife in Funny Games and appeared in The Piano Teacher).

The cast will also include Josef Bierbichler, Ulrich Tukur and Burkhart Klaussner.

Das Weisse Band is produced by Veit Heiduschka for Austrian-based Wega Film, Margaret Menegoz for French company Les Films du Losange, Stefan Arndt for German-based X- Filme Creative Pool and Stefano Massenzi for Italy’s Lucky Red.

As a European co-production, the film has received €700,000 from the Eurimages fund. It also obtained €500,000 from the Franco-German Commission for co-production support and backing from the Austrian regional fund Filmfonds Wien.