"Director: Ulrich Seidl"

• Paradise: Faith/Paradise: Hope/Paradise: Love | DVD | (30/09/2013) from £19.49   |  Saving you £5.50 (22.00%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Trilogy from provocateur director Ulrich Siedl...Love / Faith / Hope.

• Import Export | DVD | (26/01/2009) from £9.98   |  Saving you £6.01 (60.22%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Import/Export chronicles two different migrations: a young woman who leaves behind her mother and young child in the Ukraine to begin a new life as a nurse in Vienna; and a headstrong young security guard called Paul who leaves Vienna to accompany his stepfather on a trip delivering gumball machines in Eastern Europe. Blackly funny filled with striking images shot by cameraman Ed Lachman (Erin Brockovich Far From Heaven) and featuring extraordinarily potent performances from its cast Import/Export is the new film from director Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days). Hailed by critics as a startling and bold film it is without doubt recent European cinema's most provocative and audacious investigation of the post-Soviet universe and the new relations between East and West.

• Dog Days | DVD | (24/02/2003) from £6.49   |  Saving you £13.50 (67.50%)   |  RRP £19.99

  If your idea of Austrians is of cheerful folk cavorting about mountains or relaxing in old-world coffee-shops, Dog Days will come as quite a shock. Set amid the residential streets and shopping precincts of a charmless, sterile southern suburb of Vienna, documentary-maker Ulrich Seidl's first feature revels in the ugliness, both physical and moral, of his characters. None of these are people you'd want to spend time with: in fact most of them you'd go several miles out of your way to avoid, which perhaps accounts for the strangely perverse fascination there is about watching them. Dog Days--it takes place, as you might guess, during a sticky, sweltering July heatwave that improves tempers not one bit--comes on rather like a low-rent version of Robert Altman's Short Cuts. We meet a dozen or so main characters, all of whom gradually come to impact on each other's lives in various ways. Among them, a girl with a psychotically jealous boyfriend; an elderly man who obsessively stockpiles groceries, first weighing them to check for the least hint of short measure; an estranged couple still sharing a house, where the wife entertains her lovers under her husband's morose gaze; a middle-aged schoolteacher whose abusive lover invites lowlifes to join in humiliating her; a no-hoper salesman of security systems; and the world's most excruciatingly irritating hitch-hiker. There's a dark humour at work here; after a while the sheer bleakness and collective vindictiveness become wincingly funny. Seidl's disenchanted view of his compatriots, and his contempt for their vaunted gemütlichkeit, is epitomised by his image of a man forced to sing the Austrian national anthem ("A nation blessed by its sense of beauty") stark naked with a lighted candle up his backside. To cap it all, he can't remember the words. --Philip Kemp

• Import Export | Blu Ray | (05/10/2009) from £17.39   |  Saving you £2.60 (14.95%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Import/Export chronicles two different migrations: a young woman who leaves behind her mother and young child in the Ukraine to begin a new life as a nurse in Vienna; and a headstrong young security guard called Paul who leaves Vienna to accompany his stepfather on a trip delivering gumball machines in Eastern Europe. Blackly funny filled with striking images shot by cameraman Ed Lachman (Erin Brockovich Far From Heaven) and featuring extraordinarily potent performances from its cast Import/Export is the new film from director Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days). Hailed by critics as a startling and bold film it is without doubt recent European cinema's most provocative and audacious investigation of the post-Soviet universe and the new relations between East and West.