2040

Ulrich Maria Seidl is an Austrian film director, writer and producer.
His films aren't for everyone. With a tar-blackly comical spirit, Seidl depicts a modern universe that is bleak, crude, confrontational, mundane, explicit, and bracingly real. Seidl doesn’t just blur the line between documentary and narrative. He erases it. He does this so confoundingly well, in fact, that the question of “is it fact or fiction?” becomes utterly irrelevant when discussing his work.
Seidl's overarching directorial mission is to present a nearly hellish vision of modern life at its most grotesquely mundane. Rather than setting up more traditionally artificial climaxes and confrontations, he chooses instead to depict scenes from everyday life—some dramatic, most not—in which characters resort to depraved behavior out of what appears to be either boredom or a historically ingrained sense of purposelessness.