Screening
Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe)
Presented by the Austrian Cultural Forum
Austria. Dir. Ulrich Seidl. 2012, 120 mins. Digital projection. With Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungu. Gloom, doom, and hanky-panky in the tropics: looking for a little tenderness, middle-aged divorcee Teresa jets off to Kenya on holiday, where sex with the buff African “beach boys” is plentiful—and ultimately ruinous. The first film in Austrian provocateur Seidl’s (Dog Days, Import/Export) rich and ambitious Paradise trilogy is an unflinching look at love, loneliness, and sexual tourism in a post-colonialist “paradise” that’s at once harrowing and darkly comic, its spectacle of human folly made strangely moving by the director’s peculiar, but deeply felt sense of humanism.