PARADISE: Hope

Synopsis

PARADISE: Hope, the third film in the PARADISE Trilogy, tells the story of Melanie, an overweight 13-year-old-girl, and her first love. While her mother, Teresa, travels to Kenya (PARADISE: Love), and her aunt (PARADISE: Faith) does missionary work for Jesus Christ, the teenager spends her summer vacation with other adolescents in a strict diet camp in the Austrian countryside. Between sports activities and nutritional counseling, pillow fights and her first cigarettes, she falls in love with the camp director, a doctor 40-years-older than herself. The doctor fights against the guilt of this love, knowing it is impossible. But Melanie has imagined her paradise differently.

Credits

With support from: Austrian Film Institute, Vienna Film Fund, Land Niederösterreich, Eurimages, Centre National de la Cinématographie | In collaboration with: ORF Film-/Fernsehabkommen, WDR/Arte, Degeto, Arte France Cinema

Co-producers: Tatfilm, Parisienne de Production

Director's statement

"Paradise does not refer to the setting of the action, but rather, like for the other two parts of the trilogy, to the longing for it. The film describes the dreams and desires of young girls entering puberty regarding love, life and their expectations of sexuality. Insecure because she is overweight, Melanie, the film's protagonist, believes that her physical appearance is the reason for the failure of her first, great love for a man." – Ulrich Seidl

Reviews

"For all its bizarreness, PARADISE: Hope is first and foremost a razor-sharp phase displacement analysis of the deep insecurity that people who allow themselves to fall in love submit to."
Barbara Wurm, TAZ

"A tender tragedy."
Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt

"Ulrich Seidl's cinema is wise, not in the didactic sense, but rather because it is composed of lived life. The truthfulness that he finds in the faces, bodies and emotions of nonprofessional actors like Melanie Lenz and the staggering Verena Lehbauer cannot be reproduced, let alone imitated."
Markus Keuschnigg, Die Presse

″PARADISE: Hope has humor and warmth, and shows more genuine affection and kindness toward its characters than Seidl usually allows. Despite the sinister undertow, the narrative doesn′t go to the darkest places it could, making for a relatively upbeat, nay hopeful ending to a potentially depressing if formally magnificent trilogy."
Leslie Felperin, Variety

"The lightest and best part of Ulrich Seidl's trilogy about three women chasing elusive rewards, the film concludes this often distancing enterprise on an uncharacteristically compassionate note."
David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

"Seidl's protagonists are real and authentic. And that he so unconditionally trusts them and the power of their story is the particular quality of his films."
ZDF Neu im Kino

"With lots of humor, he shows the absurd drill by which young people are supposed to be indoctrinated into conventional concepts of beauty."
Peter Claus, Rheinische Post

"With a great deal of feeling Seidl formulates his plea for compassion."
Thomas Groß, Mannheimer Morgen

"Radical, disillusioning, outstanding."
Deutschlandradio

Awards | Festivals

Downloads

Pressbook PDF: german/english
Pressphotos: 9x17 cm / 300dpi / jpg

Posterlink