A strong inner conflict is the real focus of Sparta. Ewald laughs when he plays with the children. Slowly, however, his laughter turns into a cry. A cry that nobody notices, that only vents inside a car or in the retirement home where his father is. Subtle facial expressions say more than a thousand words. Ulrich Seidl (and the excellent Georg Friedrich) render all this perfectly and show us how the protagonist is actually the only real victim of his own weaknesses. At the Viennale 2022.
With a few simple shots and a single sentence repeated over and over again, Ulrich Seidl has fully conveyed the essence of his entire filmography. In Hakuna Matata – part of the collective project Venezia 70 Future Reloaded, realised on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Venice Film Festival – there is no need for anything else.
At the Diagonale 2022, director Ulrich Seidl presented his feature film Rimini, awarded Best Feature Film and already in competition at the Berlinale 2022. Cinema Austriaco had the opportunity to have a chat with him and learn more about his film and his career. Interview by Marina Pavido.
With Rimini, Ulrich Seidl once again gives us a merciless portrait of the world in which we live, in which no one is given a chance to save themselves, in which there is no hope for a better future, in which old songs from World War II still echo through the corridors of a shabby retirement home and act as a sad leitmotif in our lives.
Good News – Ulrich Seidl’s brilliant debut after a series of shorts and medium-length films – follows step by step the everyday life of all those workers, mainly from Bangladesh, who are hired by the major national newspapers in order to sell their newspapers on the streets of the city and at underground stations. A system, this one, which shows a class hierarchy more marked than ever, where the exasperated stillness of the lives of the upper class contrasts strongly with the instability, lack of certainty and security of the lives of the immigrants.
If Ulrich Seidl’s presence in Venice is, by now, almost a constant, many are waiting to finally watch his newest feature film: Wicked Games. What better occasion would there be, then, than to be able to premiere the film in the very place that brought him international fame in 2001? And yet, it seems, it will still be some time before we can see what the controversial mind of the Viennese director has come up with this time.
Absent from the 76th Venice Film Festival, Ulrich Seidl couldn’t present Wicked Games, his newest work. Yet, the controversial Austrian director is now at home at the Lido. Suffice it to say that his international notoriety was officially achieved in 2001, when he presented in competition Dog Days, which won the Grand Jury Prize.