Paradise: Hope (Ulrich Seidl, 2013)

Cast: Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas, Viviane Bartsch, Maria Hofstätter, Leopold Schiel, Rainer Luttenberger, Hannes A. Pendl. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

The third film in Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy completes the story of a family of women: The mother, Teresa, was the focus of Paradise: Love (2012); the aunt, Anna Maria, that of Paradise: Faith (2012); and young Melanie's experiences at a "fat camp" are meant to be taking place at much the same time as Teresa is experiencing pleasures of the flesh in Kenya and Anna Maria is proselytizing for Catholicism in Austria. Like the other two films, Paradise: Hope is scathingly satirical about the inability of human beings to satisfy their wants and live up to their ideals. It's a discomfiting movie, as are the other two films in the trilogy. 

Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Maria Hofstätter in Paradise: Faith

Cast: Maria Hofstätter, Nabil Saleh, René Rupnik, Natalya Baranova, Trude Masur, Dieter Masur, Michaela Hurdes-Galli. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Ulrich Seidl's intermittently fascinating, intermittently shocking, and even sometimes tedious Paradise: Faith is the middle film in his Paradise trilogy. It focuses on Anna Maria, the sister of the central character in Paradise: Love (2012) and the aunt of the teenager in Paradise: Hope (2013). Anna Maria is a religious zealot, who totes around a statue of the Virgin Mary while making door-to-door calls on strangers whom she persuades (sometimes) to pray with her. Her home is meticulously clean and adorned only with crucifixes, before which she prays and sometimes flagellates herself -- and with one of which she performs a sexual act. Before long, we discover that she's married to a Muslim, though we never quite find out how that happened. Seidl's distancing from his  characters allows us a lot of latitude in judging them, so the film is as much a provocation -- an opportunity for us to assess our responses to such religious extremism -- as it is a portrait of faith.

Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Cast: Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat, Gabriel Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano, Melanie Lenz, Maria Hofstätter. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Sexually explicit but not pornographic, Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love, the first in his Paradise trilogy, tells the story of a middle-aged Austrian woman, a sex tourist, who goes to Kenya for thrills and mistakenly tries to find love instead. Margarete Tiesel plays the woman, Teresa, and in scenes that take place in Austria we get introduced to her sister (Maria Hofstätter) and her daughter (Melanie Lenz), whose own stories are told in Paradise: Faith (2012) and Paradise: Hope (2013). The film was shot on location in Kenya, using a mixture of non-professional and professional actors. It's an unsettling, sometimes even shocking film, and a little longer than it needs to be, but also revelatory of post-colonial attitudes. 

Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar, 2014)

Theeb (the name, we learn, means "wolf") is a young Bedouin boy whose older brother, Hussein, is called on to help an Englishman find his way to a well in the desert. The Englishman, a soldier, carries with him a wooden box that arouses Theeb's curiosity, though the Englishman angrily shoos him away every time Theeb tries to inspect it. It is 1916, and we recognize the box as a detonator and, especially if we've seen Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), realize that the soldier is delivering it to the Arabs rebelling against the Ottoman Empire. When Hussein leaves with the soldier, Theeb sneaks away to follow them; when he catches up with them, the soldier insists that they don't have time to return him to the tribe's camp but must continue to the well, where he is scheduled to meet up with his contacts. At this point, the conventional desert adventure movie might play off the relationship between the angry soldier and the curious boy, perhaps developing a friendship between them as they carry out the soldier's mission. But this isn't a conventional film. It's British-Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar's first feature film, and even though he describes it as a "Bedouin Western," it's grounded in actuality more than in Hollywood genre films. All of the actors except Jack Fox, who plays the soldier, are non-professionals.  Abu Nowar and co-screenwriter Bassel Ghandour spent a year living with and researching the Bedouins in Jordan, and choosing their cast, including the pre-adolescent Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat, who plays Theeb in an engagingly natural performance. The film takes place at the same time and in the same place as Lawrence of Arabia, and the cinematography of Wolfgang Thaler shows the influence of Freddie Young's work on that film. But Theeb stands Lean's celebrated film on its head by making the soldier a dispensable secondary character. The adventure is Theeb's, as he finds himself first alone in the desert and then with a companion he has good reason to hate. The result is a smart, unsentimental look at a place and way of life filled with hardships and perils. It received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.