Directed by Michael Haneke • 1979 • Austria, West Germany
Starring Regina Sattler, Christian Ingomar, Eva Linder

A significant stylistic and thematic breakthrough for director Michael Haneke that in many ways can be seen as his first mature work, the two-part television drama LEMMINGS explores the inherited trauma and psychological alienation of Austria’s post–World War II generation with the devastating, unflinching fearlessness that would become his trademark. Part one, ARCADIA, unfolds in the 1950s as it surveys a group of teenagers who channel their rage against their rigid, ineffectual parents into nihilistic destruction.