Paradise Trilogy

The final installment in Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy, 'Paradise: Hope' tells the story of overweight thirteen-year-old Melanie and her first love. While her mother travels to Kenya ('Paradise: Love') and her aunt does missionary work ('Paradise: Faith'), Melanie spends her summer vacation at a strict diet camp for overweight adolescents. Between physical education and nutrition counseling, pillow fights and her first cigarette, Melanie falls in love with the camp director, a doctor forty years her senior. As the doctor struggles with the guilty nature of his desire, Melanie had imagined her paradise differently.

In Kenya’s tourist beaches, middle-aged European women called “Sugar Mamas” seek intimacy with young men who sell affection for survival. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and single mother, arrives on vacation hoping for connection. Moving from one encounter to another, she confronts the reality that in this setting, desire and love are inseparable from economic exchange.

Anna Maria, a single woman in her 50s, devotes her summer vacation to doing missionary work, so that Austria may be brought back to the path of virtue. On her daily pilgrimage through Vienna, she goes from door to door, carrying a foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary. When her husband, an Egyptian Muslim confined to a wheelchair, comes home after years of absence, her life is turned upside down.