Losses to Be Expected

Synopsis

Winter 1992
The widower Sepp Paur lives in a small Austrian village on the border to Czechia. The meals that his late wife has left in the freezer are slowly running out. It's time for Sepp to look around for a new spouse. He looks across the border, where the widow Paula lives. Two people, two neighboring villages, and in between? The border. That's what this film is about. But not only that. It's also about the loss of borders, the loss of homeland, the loss of youth, the loss of love. Losses to Be Expected is seen by many as one of Ulrich Seidl's most tender films. It developed out of a research foray that Seidl undertook together with his friend, cameraman and director Michael Glawogger, for his long-cherished project about the robber chief Johann Georg Grasel, who carried out his nefarious deeds in the Austrian Waldviertel region and Czechia.

Credits

Director's statement

"As far as the film's subject matter is concerned, it gained an additional dimension during shooting. The well-known East-West paradigm - there poverty and misery, here prosperity and consumer society - receded into the background and was displaced by a higher, universal human paradigm: loneliness, unfulfilled love, old age and death. At a certain point in the film it no longer seemed to matter on which side of the border you find yourself." – Ulrich Seidl

Reviews

"Ulrich Seidl's film balances skilfully between documentary and fiction film elements. Through his portraits of his two protagonists, for whom he creates sympathy and understanding, he reflects on relationships in old age and the changes in living conditions after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the ascendany of the market econonmy and capitalism... Some of the scenes in the film are so bizarre and moving that no scriptwriter could have invented them."
Bernhard Natschläger, multimedia
"Seidl succeeds in combining film entertainment and moral documentary by means of a retired Austro-Czech couple who are preparing to get married."
Erika Keil, Luzerner Neueste Nachrichten
"An at times very funny but overall bitter film about life in the country."
Dietrich zur Nedden, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung
"Austria's Ulrich Seidl directed a documentary fiction film about a bizarre search for a wife, and caused a sensation. At the Berlin Film Festival it unleashed wild enthusiasm from the audience - and great reviews."
SKIP
"Losses to Be Expected is a film about before, village life, old age, the contrast between East and West - archaic, bizarre, sad, incredibly funny. One of the most extraordinary entries at Berlin."
Der Tagesspiegel
"Losses to Be Expected describes precisely the balance sheets and calculations of Austro-Czech border crossers. Seidl's film about the old women and men who observe and inspect each other across the border fascinates us not least because of the acrobatics of camera and light that constantly blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction film."
Getrud Koch, Frankfurter Rundschau

Awards | Festivals

Awards
"Runner Up Prize", Yamagata
"Jury Prize", Amsterdam
"Golden Frame/Best Austrian Documentary Film", Austrian Film Days

Festivals
World premiere: Berlin, Forum des jungen Films 1992
The Institut of International Studies of the Charles University in Prague - seminar, Kulturforum/Bucharest, Cineteca Nacional/Mexico, Motovun FF, Thessaloniki IFF, New Horizons IFF, IDFA, Jenjou IFF/Seoul, Deutsches Filminstitut, Austrian FF, MECEFF 7+1/Romania, Minneapolis, Munich, Wels, Yamagata, Laibach, Florence, Duisburger Filmwoche, Amsterdam, Toronto IFF, Diagonale, Strasbourg, Jerusalem, Augsburg

Downloads

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