Michael Haneke is a German born, Austrian filmmaker whose bold and bare style is filled with bleak carnage and disturbing imagery, making him one of the most interesting and challenging contemporary auteurs. Haneke sees himself as “the last modernist”, and his work is known for its non-linear narration and his ability to infuse his films with unbearable tension.

As January’s featured director in our Rialto Directors Showcase, Rialto Channel is presenting an unprecedented look at his remarkable body of award-winning work.

Haneke’s cold, gloomy, and often disturbing, outlook on life can be traced to his debut feature film The Seventh Continent (Sunday 1^st January, 8.30pm), about an ordinary upper-middle class family going about their lives without any real connection to anything or anyone. One day normal becomes too much for the Schober Family, deciding they’ve had enough, they destroy their belongings and themselves.

This is the beginning of Haneke’s obsession with shaking up bourgeois complacency, a theme also running through his 1997 film Funny Games (Sunday 8^th January, 8.30pm). Described as “blood curling’ by the New York Times, this psychologically thriller is a brutal, violent and confrontational film which is often described as an arthouse version of Cape Fear - or in some cases, Scream.

Starring Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe (the Stasi spy in The Lives of Others), it’s the story of a well to do German family held hostage and tortured by a couple of psychopathic strangers when on holiday at their lake house. This was the last film of Haneke’s Austrian period, and polarised critics and audiences alike. Haneke remade Funny Games in 2007, with the American version led by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth provoking a similar response.

Code Unknown (Sunday 15^th January, 8.30pm) was Haneke’s first French language film and starred Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche. Thanks to her involvement Haneke gained international recognition for Code Unknown, as he did the following year with The Piano Teacher (Sunday 22^nd January, 8.30pm).

The Piano Teacher was the winner of the Palme d’Or for Best Feature Film in Cannes in 2001. It also won Isabelle Huppert Best Actress for her role as the sexually disturbed, aloof piano teacher Erika, and Benoit Magimel the Best Actor prize for his role as Walter, the brilliant male student Erika has an affair with. In 2009, his film The White Ribbon won Haneke his second Palme d’Or award - please note this film is screening on Rialto Channel as part of our World Cinema on Tuesday 3^rd January.

This remarkable collection of Haneke’s work is wrapped up with Hidden (Sunday 29^th January, 8.30pm), a creepy French psychological thriller once again starring Juliette Binoche alongside Daniel Auteuil, as a paranoid couple living in Paris who discover they are being secretly filmed.

It’s quite a month. Enjoy.

See the full line-up of the Michael Haneke 'Directors' Showcase' HERE.