PARADISE: Hope

PARADIES: Hoffnung (original title)

PARADISE: Hope, the third film in Ulrich Seidl's controversial PARADISE trilogy, tells the story of Melanie, Teresa's 13-year-old daughter. While her mother goes to Kenya, the teenager spends her vacations with other youngsters at a strictly run diet camp in the mountains. Between sports education and nutritional counseling, pad fights and first cigarettes, she falls in love with a doctor 40 years her senior, the camp's director. She loves him with the exclusivity of first love and wants to seduce him in all innocence. The doctor struggles against the guilt of this love, knowing its impossibility. Melanie has imagined her paradise differently.

"A fat girl is a fat girl. Why should that be pejorative?" ULRICH SEIDL