Publisher's Synopsis
A collection of the acclaimed, iconoclastic Austrian filmmaker's work. In 'Hidden' (2005), Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a successful TV presenter, happily married to Anne (Juliette Binoche). Their idyllic, middle-class life is suddenly derailed when Georges starts receiving tapes through the post, from someone who has been secretly filming him and his family as they go about their daily business. 'Time of the Wolf' (2003) is a tense post-apocalyptic drama, set in a world in which society has completely broken down. Anne (Isabelle Huppert) flees the city with her husband and two children, hoping to find refuge at the family's country home. In 'The Piano Teacher' (2001), Erika Kohut (Huppert) teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory, lives with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot), and privately engages in a series of degrading, masochistic acts. In 'Funny Games' (1997), Anna (Susan Lothar) and Georg Schober (Ulrich Muhe) arrive with their son, Georgie, at their lakeside holiday home. Through their neighbour, Fred (Christoph Bantzer), they meet Paul (Arno Frisch) and his friend Peter (Frank Giering). However, once inside Anna and Georg's house, Peter and Paul begin to torture them, betting that in 24 hours they and Georgie will all be dead. In the US remake of the same name (2007), Tim Roth and Naomi Watts play the parents while the young sadists are portrayed by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet. In 'Code Unknown' (2000), walking along a Paris street, following a meeting with his brother's girlfriend Anne (Binoche), Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) contemptuously throws an empty paper bag into the open hands of Romanian beggar Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu). Music teacher Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke) witnesses this, and when he demands that Jean apologise to Maria, the two get caught in a scuffle which results in both Amadou's arrest and Maria's deportation. 'The Seventh Continent' (1989) is a disturbing study of a family in crisis. The storyline follows three years in the life of Georg (Dieter Berner), his wife Anna (Birgit Doll) and their daughter Eva (Leni Tanzer), during which time a psychological blindness leads to the family's self-destruction. In 'Benny's Video' (1992), Benny (Frisch) is an only child, intelligent, but a bit of a loner. He sits in his room most nights, with his video cameras and TV, watching horror films and listening to heavy rock music. But everything changes when Benny invites a young girl his own age back to his room to show her a video that he has filmed. '71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance' (1994) begins with a horrific mass killing on Christmas Eve 1993 by a boy who callously kills several people then kills himself. The film then flashes back as the fragmented story follows the lives of strangers, all with different lives but all having the same sense of hopelessness, culminating into one fateful night. Finally, in 'The Castle' (1997), when land surveyor K (Muhe) arrives at a small village that houses a castle, local authorities refuse to allow him to enter. As he tries to convince the officials that they sent for him, they clamp down with increasingly complicated bureaucratic obstacles.