Safari

A film by Ulrich Seidl

Africa. In the wild expanses, where bushbucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with elation and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.

Credits

Funding from: Austrian Film Institute, Danish Film Institute, Abteilung Kunst und Kultur des Landes NÖ, DR | in collaboration with: ORF Film/Fernseh-Abkommen | Co-produced by: ARTE G.E.I.E., Danish Documentary, WDR

Director's statement

"With Safari I wasn't interested in showing the wealthy, the aristocrats, the sheikhs and the oligarchs hunting big game in Africa, but rather the normal, the ordinary hunter. For many years now, hunting in Africa has been affordable for the average citizen of the west. I set out to discover and portray what motivates such people to hunt, and why they can even become obsessed by it. But along the way the film also became a film about killing. About killing for pleasure without ever facing danger, about killing as a kind of emotional liberation." – Ulrich Seidl

Reviews

"Ulrich Seidl's most disturbing film, it depicts the longing for death as the ultimate tourist experience.”
Peter Angerer, Tiroler Tageszeitung

"Yet Safari is anything but a propaganda film, more a work of grief, an attack on a largely repressed, structurally racist subculture... For all its sociological interest, Safari takes cinema at its word: It is about life and death, black and white, shot and reverse shot. And finally also, without the least frivolity, about the obscenity that lies in the arousal provoked by butchery."
Stefan Grissemann, Profil

"Another strong work."
Oliver Stangl, RAY

"Ulrich Seidl, with his customary flawless images (by cameraman Wolfgang Thaler) and the observation of a few weird people, achieves nothing less than a cruel and angry, very believable portrait of humankind per se."
Gini Brenner, Skip

"Ulrich Seidl's Safari is a filmic study of racism, hunting ethics and post-colonial luxury tourism… A film of extremes that challenges the spectator."
Stefan Seemann, The Gap

"Ulrich Seidl's new film Safari refuses the slightest voyeurism. At a suitable distance, literally as pictorially, the filmmaker follows a handful of Austrian and German hunting tourists in Africa. Any resulting emotions are produced by the spectator later in the darkness of the cinema. Seidl's directorial strategy (the concept of which he developed together with his wife Veronika Franz) - and his great artistry - lie as always in first the unmistakable gaze and then vigorous editing."
Michaela Mottinger, Mottingers-meinung.at

"The film is very impressive and I can only recommend that everyone sees it when it comes out in cinemas."
Martin Balluch, animal ethicist and animal rights activist, Verein gegen Tierfabriken [Association against Animal Factories]

Awards | Festivals

Awards

2017 BILD-KUNST SCHNITT PREIS DOKUMENTARFILM. SAFARI Edit: Christof Schertenleib and Christoph Brunner

Downloads

Pressbook PDF: german/english
Pressphotos:

Posterlink