Paradise: Love

Tue 3 Sep
6.15 pm

The first film in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love, offers a sombre proposition offset by radiant visuals. On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as “Sugar Mamas” – European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise. She goes from one beach boy to the next, from one disappointment to the next and finally she must recognize: on the beaches of Kenya love is a business.

120 mins
in German with English subtitles
Austria | 2012 | col | dir. Ulrich Seidl, with Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux

Paradise: Faith

Wed 4 Sep
3 pm

In this second instalment of the Paradise trilogy, Ulrich Seidl explores what it means to bear the cross. For Anna Maria, an X-ray technician, paradise lies with Jesus. She devotes her vacation to missionary work, so that Austria may be brought back to the path of virtue. One day, after years of absence, her husband, an Egyptian Muslim confined to a wheelchair, comes home. This movie recounts the stations of the cross of a marriage and the longing for love.

115 mins
in German with English subtitles
Austria | 2012 | col | dir. Ulrich Seidl, with Maria Hofstätter, Nabil Saleh, Natalya Baranova

Paradise: Hope

Wed 4 Sep
6.15 pm

The final part of Ulrich Seidl’s compelling Paradise trilogy ends on a surprisingly tender note, while retaining the same languid approach and striking aesthetic as in the first two films. This last instalment of the trilogy tells the story of Melanie, an overweight 13-year-old, and her first love. While her mother, Teresa, travels to Kenya, and her aunt does missionary work for Jesus Christ, the teenager spends her summer vacation with other adolescents in a strictly run diet camp in the Austrian countryside, where she falls in love with the camp director, a doctor forty years her senior. The doctor struggles against the guilt of this love, aware of its impossibility. Melanie had imagined her paradise differently.

100 mins
in German with English subtitles
Austria | 2013 | col | dir. Ulrich Seidl, with Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz