Filmmaker: Messy Humanity, Warts, Dreams and All in Paradise

THE NEW YORK TIMES 
By Nicholar Rapold

HOLLYWOOD---The work of Ulrich Seidl can perhaps be summed up by his preferred camera perspective: head-on, often boxed in, warts and all. This Austrian filmmaker has made a 30-year career of confronting us with people you don’t usually see on screen (much less naked) and stories you don’t expect to see played out. Scenes from his latest project, the “Paradise” trilogy, depict a part-time Catholic missionary rousing the ire of a belligerent drunk, an adolescent girl at a weight-loss clinic pining for her doctor, and middle-aged sex tourists manhandling their Kenyan boy toy. In “Faith,” a conservative Catholic hospital worker proselytizes door to door while fending off her Muslim paraplegic ex-husband at home. [link]

Paradise (German: Paradies) is the collective name of three films directed by Ulrich Seidl: Paradise: Love, Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope. The project was conceived as one 130-minute feature film.