Paradies: Glaube

What started as one film project with three stories developed into the Paradise trilogy. After premieres at Cannes (Love, 2012) and Venice (Faith, 2012), the third part, Hope (2013), is debuting at the coming Berlin Festival - meaning that Ulrich Seidl has scored a unique hat-trick.
Faith, hope and love do not guarantee happiness with the melancholy Austrian, who makes features and documentaries in more or less the same style, focusing on long, static shots of sombre, symmetrically shot spaces. Seidl’s subject is, as always, shocking. In Paradise: Faith, the Christian faith of an Austrian fundamentalist (regular Seidl heroine Maria Hofstätter), who sells statues of the Virgin Mary door to door, chastises herself and also professes her love of Jesus in a sexual way, clashes increasingly violently with the reactionary worldview of her Islamic and wheelchair-bound Egyptian husband. This earned the film the Special Jury Prize in Venice.