A journey into the depths of the Austrian soul Ulrich Seidl is an Austrian film director, screenwriter and producer. His films are often characterized by a documentary-like style, blending fiction and nonfiction and using long, fixed shots as well as abrupt cuts. In 2001 he was awarded the Grand Jury Price at the Venice Film Festival for his film "Dog Days" and his recent "Paradise" trilogy was critically acclaimed worldwide. His latest film "Im Keller" (In the Basement) is a journey through the depths of the Austrian soul: it is about brass band music and opera arias, expensive furniture and sleazy jokes, sexuality and sadism, fitness and fascism, snakes and weapons, love and the yearning for it. This accompanying book intends to draw attention to the specific esthetics and social dimension of Seidl's tableaux with the help of film frames and texts. Selected motifs of this tour through the basements of typical Austrian family homes communicate with texts by film critics, philosophers, psychologists, authors and essay writers.

Ulrich Seidl: Born 1962, is film director, screenwriter and producer. In 2001, his first film Dog Days won the Silver Lion Jury's Special Award at the international Venice Film Festival. Some of his earlier documentaries such as Good News, Animal Love and Models have also received numerous prizes. His PARADISE trilogy Love, Faith and Hope, which premiered in Cannes, Venice and Berlin, has lately received worldwide attention. Seidl works with partly disturbing formal means - long and static shots, abrupt editing and distance. He is regarded as a radical filmmaker whose impressive documentaries set the scene for taboo themes.