Import/Export

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. These two tales were supposed to be told in one film – and now they finally are! The result offers a staggeringly different experience of the narrative(s). It's far more cerebral, above all a work of ideas.

Sarah, a former professional kickboxer from Vienna, accepts an offer to work as a personal trainer for a rich family in the Middle East. She finds herself in a foreign world, in a palace behind walls and cut off from the internet, where the sisters are under surveillance around the clock. They have no interest in learning to box. So why has Sarah been brought here?

Main character of this movie is Rene Rupnik, a former math teacher. He is forty years old and lives together with his mother in a desolate block of flats. Ever since his early youth women with big breasts have fascinated him, because they symbolise a kind of earth mother to him. He has never had an especially close relationship with his own mother; she was too 'bony' for him. Object of Rene's fantasy is the actress Senta Berger, to him everything a woman should be. Standing by the blackboard and explaining the mathematical laws of sine and cosine ('sinus' is bosom in Latin), Rene sings the praises of the female curves and those of Santa Berger in particular. Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl let the former teacher speak freely about his obsessions and desires, intercutting his monologues with scenes from the protagonist's day-to-day life.

On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as "Sugar Mamas" —European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise, moving from beach to beach.

Vienna, Austria, 1910. The young painter Egon Schiele is a rising artist, provocative and free, whose work, characterized by eroticism, shocks as much as it fascinates art lovers.

In the heat of the summer lays a lonesome house in the countryside where nine year old twin brothers await their mother’s return. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before and the children start to doubt whether this woman is actually who she says she is.

In 1750 Austria, a deeply religious woman named Agnes has just married her beloved, but her mind and heart soon grow heavy as her life becomes a long list of chores and expectations. Day after day, she is increasingly trapped in a murky and lonely path leading to evil thoughts, until the possibility of committing a shocking act of violence seems like the only way out of her inner prison.

Vignettes of the lives of several residents of a Vienna suburb during a heat wave.

Ewald moved to Romania years ago. Now in his 40s, he seeks a fresh start. Leaving his girlfriend, he moves to the hinterland. With young boys from the area, he transforms a decaying school into a fortress. The children enjoy a new, carefree existence. But the distrust of the villagers is soon awoken. And Ewald is forced to confront a truth he has long suppressed.

In conurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals. Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.

For Anna Maria, paradise lies with Jesus, and she devotes her time to door-to-door missionary work. One day after years of absence, her husband, an Egyptian Muslim confined to a wheelchair, comes home—and soon prayers are replaced by fighting.

Africa. In the wild expanses, where bush-bucks, 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 excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.

Richie Bravo, once upon a time a successful pop star, chases after his faded fame in wintry Rimini. Trapped between permanent intoxication and concerts for busloads of tourists, his world starts to collapse when his adult daughter breaks into his life.

Her mother in Kenya, 13-year-old Melanie spends her summer vacation at a strict diet camp set in the Austrian countryside. Between workouts and nutrition classes, pillow fights and first cigarettes, she falls in love with a doctor 40 years her senior.

Lillian, stranded as an emigrant in New York, wants to walk back to her native Russia. Determined, she sets out on the long journey. A road movie across the United States into the cold of Alaska. The chronicle of a slow disappearance.

Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl explores of the dark underside of the human psyche by entering Austrian basements fitted out as private domains for secrets and fetishes.