18th century Austria. Villages surrounded by deep forests. A woman is sentenced to death after killing a baby. Agnes is marrying her loved one and candidly prepares herself for a spouse life. Soon after, her head and heart start to feel heavy. Day after day, she is increasingly trapped in a murky and lonely path leading to evil thoughts. Maybe not just thoughts…
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, moving from beach to beach.
In the heat of the summer lays a lonesome house in the countryside where nine year old twin brothers await their mother’s return. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before and the children start to doubt whether this woman is actually who she says she is.
For Anna Maria, paradise lies with Jesus, and she devotes her time to door-to-door missionary work. One day after years of absence, her husband, an Egyptian Muslim confined to a wheelchair, comes home—and soon prayers are replaced by fighting.
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.
Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl explores of the dark underside of the human psyche by entering Austrian basements fitted out as private domains for secrets and fetishes.
Vienna, Austria, 1910. The young painter Egon Schiele is a rising artist, provocative and free, whose work, characterized by eroticism, shocks as much as it fascinates art lovers.
Ewald moved to Romania years ago. Now in his 40s, he seeks a fresh start. Leaving his girlfriend, he moves to the hinterland. With young boys from the area, he transforms a decaying school into a fortress. The children enjoy a new, carefree existence. But the distrust of the villagers is soon awoken. And Ewald is forced to confront a truth he has long suppressed. Sparta is the brother film to Rimini (2022), and the conclusion of Ulrich Seidl's diptych about the inescapability of the past and the pain of finding yourself.
Richie Bravo, once upon a time a successful pop star, chases after his faded fame in wintry Rimini. Trapped between permanent intoxication and concerts for busloads of tourists, his world starts to collapse when his adult daughter breaks into his life.
Africa. In the wild expanses, where bush-bucks, 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.
Alone in a secluded mansion, Giacomo Casanova cries out then collapses. When the mysterious and beautiful writer, Elisa von der Recke, comes to visit, it breathes new life into the old man. A movie that captures the myth of the greatest seducer of all times, Casanova, his story is told both through fiction and on-stage opera performances that unravel the tale of his adventures, his passions, and ultimately his fear of death.
The Maynards and their children lead an almost perfect billionaire family life. Amon is a passionate hunter, but doesn’t shoot animals, as the family's wealth allows them to live totally free from consequences.
Sarah, a former professional kickboxer from Vienna, accepts an offer to work as a personal trainer for a rich family in the Middle East. She finds herself in a foreign world, in a palace behind walls and cut off from the internet, where the sisters are under surveillance around the clock. They have no interest in learning to box. So why has Sarah been brought here?
Lillian, stranded as an emigrant in New York, wants to walk back to her native Russia. Determined, she sets out on the long journey. A road movie across the United States into the cold of Alaska. The chronicle of a slow disappearance.
Johannes, an innocent, Kaspar Hauser-like man with the heart of a child, lives secluded in an alpine hut together with his eagle and his devout mother. Daily life in this isolated world is governed by prayer and ritual. But suddenly, modern objects and disruptive noises intrude between nature and worship. A tourist development threatens to poison their paradise and awaken the devil.
Young women, Austrian style. Yesmin is Kurdish and wears a headscarf. She shoots a cheeky burqa video with Bella and Nati which makes the trio famous in the Muslim community. Controversy and alienation ensue. Immediate, exuberantly introverted cinema.
Lisa Weber’s portrait of Claudia, who had a son when she was 15 and now lives together with him, her mother and her brother in Vienna, is an affectionate and gentle film about the passing of time and about what happens when seemingly nothing is happening.
Tourism is booming at the Pension Alpenrose. After a dying in an accident, Karin returns as one of the undead. In a cinema owned by a Nazi widow where the past is mourned, she brings the dead back to life.
In Rimini (2022) and Sparta (2022), Ulrich Seidl followed the lives of two brothers, Richie and Ewald, respectively. The former is a crooner long past his prime yet still beloved by hordes of late-middle-aged female fans who can also buy his sexual attention; the latter is a technician living in Romania and wrestling with his pedophile desires. These two tales were supposed to be told in one film – and now they finally are! The result offers a staggeringly different experience of the narrative(s). It's far more cerebral, above all a work of ideas.
Norman, who lost his parents in a fire as a child, is obsessed with light and haunted by its destructive powers.
