Ulrich Seidl talks up horror title

Ulrich Seidl is to produce the horror film Ich seh/Ich seh co-directed by his wife and long-standing collaborator Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.

“It will be a mixture of auteur film/genre film and the story is set in midsummer, so, hopefully, we will be able to shoot it this year,“ Seidl told ScreenDaily.

This will be Franz and Fiala’s first fiction feature film following their collaboration on Kern, a documentary about the controversial Austrian actor-director Peter Kern, which premiered at last year’s Diagonale and won the Talent Dove at DOKLeipzig.

Seidl added that his documentary Im Keller about the Austrians’ relationship with their cellars is still at the editing stage and should be ready by the middle of the year for a premiere “possibly in the autumn”.

He also revealed that his next fiction feature will be “a bigger film with a historical subject entitled Der Grasel”.

Seidl added: “It’s quite a new direction for me and is a project I have been carrying around with me for decades. The financing is likely to take around two years to put together.“

At the centre is the “Robber Captain” Johann Georg Grasel who operated at the turn of the 19^th century in Waldviertel and South Bohemia.

In 2002, Seidl pitched the project at Rotterdam’s CineMart and said at the time that he had been waiting 15 years to realise the project.

The third part of Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Hope, will have its world premiere tonight at the Berlinale Palast in the Official Competition.