WICKED GAMES Rimini Sparta

  • 205'
  • Austria
  • 2023

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. When Seidl commenced this endeavour, these two tales were supposed to be told in one film – and now they finally are!

The result, WICKED GAMES Rimini Sparta, offers a staggeringly different experience of the narrative(s). It's far more cerebral, above all a work of ideas. In the film's first, winter-set movement, the two strands are tightly interwoven, mirroring, complementing each other into a devastatingly bleak vision of lost childhood as a state of mind. The second, summer-set movement is focused on Ewald and the Spartan fantasies he lives out with a band of boys in a fortress they build, now seen as a sublimation of his father's obsession with German fascism that makes him spout Nazi songs and slogans when he barely remembers anything else (while the father of one little Spartan tries to turn the boy against Ewald by brutally ‘educating’ him to embrace evil). All of which makes WICKED GAMES a more disconcerting, disconsolate and heart-broken, but also in many ways richer version of the project.

 

Olaf Möller

  • 205'
  • Austria
  • 2023
Director
Ulrich Seidl
Premiere
World premiere
Countries of production
Austria, Germany, France
Year
2023
Festival Edition
IFFR 2023
Length
205'
Medium
DCP
Original title
BÖSE SPIELE Rimini Sparta
Languages
German, Italian, Romanian
Producers
Ulrich Seidl, Philippe Bober, Michel Merkt
Production Company
Coproduction Office
Sales
Coproduction Office
Screenplay
Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz
Cinematography
Wolfgang Thaler
Editor
Monika Willi
Production Design
Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin
Sound Design
Matz Müller
Music
Fritz Ostermayer, Herwig Zamernik
Cast
Hans-Michael Rehberg, Michael Thomas, Georg Friedrich, Florentina Elena Pop, Tessa Göttlicher, Inge Maux, Claudia Martini
Local Distributor
September Film
Director
Ulrich Seidl
Premiere
World premiere
Countries of production
Austria, Germany, France
Year
2023
Festival Edition
IFFR 2023
Length
205'
Medium
DCP
Original title
BÖSE SPIELE Rimini Sparta
Languages
German, Italian, Romanian
Producers
Ulrich Seidl, Philippe Bober, Michel Merkt
Production Company
Coproduction Office
Sales
Coproduction Office
Screenplay
Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz
Cinematography
Wolfgang Thaler
Editor
Monika Willi
Production Design
Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin
Sound Design
Matz Müller
Music
Fritz Ostermayer, Herwig Zamernik
Cast
Hans-Michael Rehberg, Michael Thomas, Georg Friedrich, Florentina Elena Pop, Tessa Göttlicher, Inge Maux, Claudia Martini
Local Distributor
September Film