Ulrich Seidl - A Director at Work

Anyone who has watched an Ulrich Seidl documentary will have wondered how this Austrian director manages to persuade his subjects to reveal so much of themselves – sometimes literally. Somehow he manages to seduce them into confessing their deepest desires and obsessions. Although Constantin Wulff's documentary about the filmmaker doesn't expose that particular trick of the trade, the short conversations with Seidl himself, his actors, and his wife and co-writer Veronika Franz do show where his fascinations lie: in the darkness behind the respectable facade most of us create for ourselves. Between the sparse interviews, Wulff concentrates on calmly observing Seidl's behavior on the set – behavior that's frequently lacking in subtlety. We see the filmmaker at work on In the Basement (his new documentary about what the Austrians are up to in those enormous cellars beneath their tidy houses) and at rehearsals for the stage play Böse Buben / Fiese Männer. Seidl explains that some of his interests can be traced to childhood: as a child, he was afraid of the dark in the basement of his parent's house, and ever since he's been trying to find out what was hidden there. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)