Paradise: Love
| Paradise: Love | |
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| Directed by | Ulrich Seidl |
| Produced by | Ulrich Seidl |
| Written by | Ulrich Seidl Veronika Franz |
| Starring | Margarethe Tiesel Peter Kazungu Inge Maux |
| Cinematography | Wolfgang Thaler Ed Lachman |
| Edited by | Christof Schertenleib |
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Production
company |
Ulrich Seidl Film
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Release date
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Running time
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120 minutes |
| Country | Austria |
| Language | German English |
Paradise: Love (German: Paradies: Liebe) is a 2012 drama film directed by Ulrich Seidl. It tells the story of a 50-year-old white woman who travels to Kenya as a sex tourist. The project is an Austrian production with co-producers in Germany and France. It is the first installment in Seidl's Paradise trilogy, a project first conceived as one film with three parallel stories.
Paradise: Love competed at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It subsequently screened within such festivals as Toronto International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival and New Zealand International Film Festival.
50-year-old Austrian woman Teresa is on holiday in a beach resort in Kenya. She encounters younger men and has sex with them. She worries whether they really find her attractive. Actually they are prostitutes, although they deny that they have had encounters with other white women and do not ask a fee for their services, but instead ask for financial support for relatives in need. Teresa's friends hire a male stripper for her birthday, who dances nude for them. They are disappointed that they do not succeed much in sexually arousing him. Later Teresa invites the bartender of her resort into her room and instructs him to kiss her genital area, which he politely declines. Angrily she tells him to get out.
Meanwhile she is disappointed that she does not get in touch on the telephone with her daughter in Austria.
The origin of the film was a screenplay Ulrich Seidl wrote with his wife Veronika Franz, consisting of six stories about Westerners who travel to developing countries as tourists. Sex tourism became a recurring motif in the script. The project was then reworked to focus more on a single family, and was in that incarnation supposed to be a 130-minute feature film with the title Paradise, consisting of three parallel stories, each focusing on one family member—two adult sisters and a daughter—searching for paradisiac experiences.
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