URLICH SEIDLS’S PARADISE LOVE
Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) Austria. Dir. Ulrich Seidl. 2012, 120 mins. Digital projection. With Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungu.
Gloom, doom, and hanky-panky in the tropics: looking for a little tenderness, middle-aged divorcee Teresa jets off to Kenya on holiday, where sex with the buff African “beach boys” is plentiful—and ultimately ruinous. The first film in Austrian provocateur Seidl’s (Dog Days, Import/Export) rich and ambitious Paradise trilogy is an unflinching look at love, loneliness, and sexual tourism in a post-colonialist “paradise” that’s at once harrowing and darkly comic, its spectacle of human folly made strangely moving by the director’s peculiar, but deeply felt sense of humanism.
Panorama Europe
April 4–13
Programmed by David Schwartz, Chief Curator, Museum of the Moving Image
Co-presented by Museum of the Moving Image and the European Union National Institutes for Culture, Panorama Europe is a unique showcase of seventeen contemporary European features and a program of short films. Formerly known as Disappearing Act, the newly re-named festival continues the mission of showcasing vital European filmmaking as distribution remains challenging for foreign-language films in the United States. Panorama Europe gives New York audiences what may be their only chance to see these acclaimed films from the festival circuit on the big screen. This year’s festival will take place at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and at Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan.
Ulrich Seidl was born in Vienna in 1952 and grew up in the town of Horn in Lower Austria. He studied journalism, art history and drama in Vienna, supporting himself with odd jobs, before entering the prestigious Vienna Film Academy at the age of 26. In 1980 he made his first documentary, Einsvierzig. Following the controversy surrounding his second film, Der Ball (1982) – a wickedly satirical portrait of the graduation ball in his home town – Seidl was asked to leave the Film Academy. In 1990 he returned to the scene with the feature-length documentary Good News. Within the decade Seidl was to make seven more documentaries for cinema and television, winning much acclaim and many prizes for his work.
Hundstage – Dog Days, his first fiction film, was released in 2001 and won several important awards, beginning with the grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2001. The same year also saw the release of Zur Lage / State of the Nation, a critical survey of Austria under its far-right coalition government. Seidl initiated, oversaw and co-directed the project, which also contains episodes directed by Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger and Michael Sturminger. In 2003 he is planning to release Jesus, du weisst– a very strong film, he promises. —visionsdureel.ch