Paradise: Love

The first instalment of Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love (2012) competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and confirmed the Austrian director's reputation as one of European cinema's most unsparing observers of human behaviour. Each film in the trilogy follows a different woman of one family in pursuit of an idea of happiness.

Margarete Tiesel gives a brave, exposed performance as Teresa, the holidaymaker navigating Kenya's "beach boy" economy of sex tourism. Seidl, working in his trademark style of static, painterly tableaux and unflinching long takes, refuses to let either Teresa or the men she encounters off the hook, laying bare the racial and economic inequalities beneath the fantasy of romance. The film is frequently uncomfortable to watch, by design, and provoked strong reactions on release.

Critics recognised it as a rigorous, morally complex work — neither condemnation nor exoneration, but a clear-eyed anatomy of loneliness and exploitation. Seidl's background in documentary lends the fiction an almost clinical authenticity. Confronting, formally precise and impossible to shrug off, Paradise: Love is challenging cinema in the fullest sense, the work of a director determined to look directly at what most films look away from. It is essential, if demanding, viewing. Tiesel's exposed, courageous performance anchors a film that neither judges nor excuses, and Seidl's trilogy as a whole stands as one of the most rigorous projects in recent European cinema.