Over the past decades, Austrian director and screenwriter Michael Haneke has become internationally known for disturbing films that raise questions of morality and seek to systematically undermine viewers’ expectations while holding them responsible for the crimes and violence playing out on screen. Haneke scholar Catherine Wheatley has observed that

Haneke's most recent films, Das weiBe Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) and Amour (2012), have earned him an unprecedented number of nominations and awards, among them not only two Palmes d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and various other European film prizes but, for the first time in his career, also two Golden Globes and one Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film from juries in the USA. His status as European auteur has been sealed by the overwhelming critical success of Das weiBe Band and Amour, which are, like most Haneke films, transnationally funded and executed projects.

Das weiBe Band, a German-language film set in rural Protestant Germany in the years leading up to World War I, deals with a specifically German theme, was shot in Germany, and had a German cast and crew; but it is also a co-production between Germany, Austria, France and Italy. Amour, on the other hand, is a French-language film that tells the story of an elderly couple struggling to cope with the slow, agonising death of the wife. Filmed in France, it stars French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert, and has a Franco-German-Austrian production context. Many films made outside the USA (or more precisely: Hollywood) are, of course, transnational co-productions. Unable to compete with Hollywood's high budgets and marketing machine, national film industries in Europe ‘pool finances, government subsidies, labour and talent’ (Baltruschat 2013: 11) for projects that gain immediate access to the different national markets involved.