Ulrich Seidl
New Film: Paradise: Love
Country: Austria
Age: 59
Best Known for: His naturalistic and explicit style that punctuates films like 2007's Import/Export and 2001's Dog Days
Cannes History
Import/Export was Seidl's first film in Competition at Cannes. Paradise: Love is his second.
His Resume
A documentarian for many years, Seidl only made the transition to feature-length narrative cinema in 1999 with Models. His follow-up, Dog Days (2001), is perhaps his best known work. It focuses one summer in the odd sexual lives of a group of Austrians. Like all of Seidl's other films, he wrote the screenplay, and for his efforts, he was rewarded with a Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
It was back to non-fiction for a pair of mid-2000s films—State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters and Jesus, You Know. Then, Seidl made his Cannes debut with Import/Export, and he hasn't made a film since.
Seidl On-Demand
Hulu Plus: N/A
iTunes: N/A
Netflix Instant: Animal Love
Vudu: N/A
Paradise: Love
"A female-fronted drama conceived as three shorts films entitled 'Sugar Mama', 'Melania' and 'Paradise'. Between them, the three films tell the tale of Teresa, a middle-aged woman who cares for the disabled, and her overweight teenage daughter Melanie. As Teresa heads off to Kenya for a holiday, Melanie is packed off to an Austrian weight loss camp." —Time Out
Seidl, like Reygadas (and a handful of other filmmakers in the Competition), is someone I had been completely unfamiliar with until over a month ago. Unlike Reygadas, I don't like Seidl's chances when it comes to walking home with a prize.
Paradise: Love seems too obtuse for a jury made up of Alexander Payne, Ewan McGregor, Nanni Moretti, and more. It's one thing to embrace this film as a piece of art, but to immortalize it (an overstatement maybe, but still) with a Palme just seems unlikely. I suspect this is the kind of film that will be tepidly received at first and might slowly build a support base over months, even a year or more. But Lord knows I've been wrong before, and I'd love nothing more than one of these out-of-nowhere foreign guys to knock off the big bad American favorites.
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