Paradise: Hope / Paradies: Hoffnung

AUSTRIA | GERMANY, FRANCE / 2012 / 91min.

Paradise: Hope / Paradies: Hoffnung by Ulrich Seidl

Cast: Melanie Lenz, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas

Nominations and awards: Berlin Film Festival 2013 – Competition

Short synopsis:

The third film in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy tells the story of Melanie, an overweight 13-year-old, and her first love. While her mother, Teresa, travels to Kenya (PARADISE: LOVE), and her aunt (PARADISE: FAITH) 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. Between sports activities and nutritional counseling, pillow fights and her first cigarettes, she falls in love with the camp director, a doctor 40 years her senior. She loves him with the unconditionality of first love, and tries in total innocence to seduce him. The doctor struggles against the guilt of this love, aware of its impossibility. Melanie had imagined her paradise differently.

Film Director: Ulrich Seidl

Ulrich Seidl was born in Vienna, Austria in 1952. He studied filmmaking at the Vienna Film Academy. His short documentary THE BALL (1982) almost led to his expulsion from film school, both for the film’s “morally and ethically dubious” content (it was seen to be mocking of its subjects) and also for its form: Seidl was accused of presenting the film unedited. Before directing narrative feature films, Seidl directed the award-winning documentaries: GOOD NEWS (1990), ANIMAL LOVE (1995) and MODELS (1998). JESUS, YOU KNOW (2003) premiered in Competition at Karlovy Vary where it won Best Documentary, while IN THE BASEMENT (2014) and SAFARI (2016) both screened Out of Competition in Venice.