Top 20 Alternative Picks for Cannes 2012: Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love

Paradise: Love – Ulrich Seidl

Buzz: While part of the elite class of filmmakers who’ve attained Main Competition status (now for a second time), I still feel that the Dog Days and Import/Export helmer Ulrich Seidl is sort of an anomaly amongst his peers. Having worked on his sex tourism trilogy for the better parts of 2009 to 2011, this mixes a cast of professionals and non-actors in factual settings.

Guest: Inspired by Ödön von Horváth’s 1932 play Faith, Hope and Charity, the first part in a trilogy, on Kenya’s beaches they are known as “sugar mamas”: European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian woman, travels to this vacation paradise. “PARADISE: Love” tells of older women and young men, of Europe and Africa, and of the exploited, who end up exploiting others.