Ulrich Seidl

In a suburb of Vienna during some hot summer days: A teacher who is in bondage to a sleazy pimp, a very importunate hitchhiker, a private detective on the run for some car vandals, a couple with a serious marriage problem and an old man, whose wife died long before on the search for some sexual entertainment live their lives while their lifelines cross from time to time. (imdb)

Six Catholics share their thoughts and problems with Jesus in different churches. The camera accompanies them. (imdb)

A nurse from the Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. (imdb)

The film follows the daily routine of four aspiring models in Vienna, Austria.

A dark documentary about love between humans and their pets

Main character of this movie is Rene Rupnik, a former math teacher. He is forty years old and lives together with his mother in a desolate block of flats. Ever since his early youth women with big breasts have fascinated him, because they symbolise a kind of earth mother to him. He has never had an especially close relationship with his own mother; she was too 'bony' for him. (imdb)

Being widowed for over a year, lonely Sepp takes trips from his small village on the Austrian/Czech boarder into the nearby Czech village hoping to find a new wife.

A documentary following a teacher who wants to find out more about why fellow Austrians have decided to form relationships not with local women but instead with women from the Philippines and Thailand. As he investigates he finds himself encountering shocking regressive and patriarchal attitudes which agrees with.

An afternoon in the biggest fair of Germany (imdb)

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.

This documentary, Ulrich Seidl's full-length film debut, examines the lives of the street newspaper sellers in Vienna, a mixture of men from Turkey, India, Pakistan, Egypt and Eastern Europe, standing out in all weathers, peddling the trivial Viennese tabloids. We see their lives on the street, their cramped living quarters, their minders, the 'training' days, and the inhumane process which keeps them working endless hour for little reward. (imdb)

One day, after years of absence, her husband, an Egyptian Muslim confined to a wheelchair, comes home. Hymns and prayers are now joined by fighting. "PARADISE: Faith" recounts the stations of the cross of a marriage and the longing for love. (mubi.com)

Her mother in Kenya, 13-year-old Melanie spends her summer vacation at a strict diet camp set in the Austrian countryside. Between workouts and nutrition classes, pillow fights and first cigarettes, she falls in love with a doctor 40 years her senior - and in all innocence sets out to seduce him. Paradise: Hope is a "teen camp" movie that tells of the unconditionality of first love. (mubi.com)

The basement in Austria is a place of free time and the private sphere. Many Austrians spend more time in the basement of their home than in their living room, which often is only for show. In the basement they actually indulge their needs, their hobbies, passions and obsessions. But in our unconscious, the basement is also a place of darkness, a place of fear, a place of human abysses.

Africa. In the wild expanses, where bushbucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature. (73rd Venice International Film Festival)

This is a film about the 'students ball' in Horn, the little Austrian town Seidl grew up. The movie portraits the young débutantes as well as the local notables, all of them eagerly involved in maintaining the stiff and stifling ritual. (imdb)

Seidl takes his camera to an abstract-art exhibition and asks the public to comment on what they see. Some analyse the work from a strictly Freudian angle as they nibble their canapés; others can only see penises. In reality, the paintings are simply an excuse for Seidl to unmask the anguishes, fears, suspicions and sexual taboos of gathered together there. (KG)

The subject is a 50-year-old dwarf who stopped growing at 1 meter 40. He is fat and plays the piano strangely but the point Seidl makes is that he is like others, and you should judge him according to the same criteria you would judge them. (KG)

The death of his mother brings Richie Bravo back from his adopted home in Italy to his teenage bedroom in Lower Austria, where Charlton Heston is still flexing his biceps and Winnetou is still alive.

Sparta depicts an Austrian man named Ewald who is a non-offending pedophile and teaches judo to boys in Romania. The film is the second in a diptych; the other film, Rimini, centres on Ewald's brother. (wikipedia)

Two Austrian brothers try to find happiness abroad, while their father, who suffers from dementia, makes the same rounds day after day in the old-age home.