Good News

Newspaper vendors in the streets of Vienna are often young men from countries such as India, Pakistan, Turkey or Egypt. Seidl follows these men, not only on the streets where they work, but also in the places where they live and where they congregate. He contrasts these worlds with that of the Austrians who read the papers they sell.

Ulrich Seidl: "I wasn’t interested in making a film to expose the machinations of a newspaper conglomerate, one intended solely to awaken viewers’ compassion for the newspaper vendors, or one that deals only in terms of good and evil, but rather a film that, through observation of foreign worlds, turn your gaze to your own daily life and its insanity."

Good News is a film about modern slaves and modern overseers. About the insanity of normalcy in Austria. Here the world of the newspaper vendors, there the world of the newspaper readers in their Austrian living rooms.

Controversy

The screening of a rough cut of the film led to a fierce controversy, and it could never have been completed without the help of Werner Herzog. A single print of the film, shown in a single cinema, managed to draw 20,000 viewers. A sensation, especially for a documentary movie at the time. Werner Herzog still lists it on his documentary top ten. Herzog: "Rarely has anyone made with such rigor and with such aesthetic determination a film that shows the terrible regularity of daily life, the insanity of normalcy."

Good News contains many of the characteristics that make his later work so interesting: an interest in the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of the quotidian; static and symmetrical shots mixed with an active hand-held camera, Seidl’s consciously decided not to take sides, but to leave it up to viewers and the presence of tableaux. Good News was Seidl’s first feature film and was shot seven years after leaving film school.