Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen

Winter, 1992. Widower Sepp lives in a small Austrian village on the border with the Czech Republic. The meals his deceased wife left in the freezer are slowly running out. Time then for Sepp to look around for a new wife. His gaze wanders across the border – where widow Paula lives. Sepp is looking for a woman to look after him, and offers Paula a somewhat more carefree – in a material sense – existence, with full supermarkets and shopping malls. Paula is impressed by all this prosperity over the border, but also has her doubts.

Ulrich Seidl: "The well-known East-West paradigm – there poverty and misery, here prosperity and consumer society – receded into the background and was displaced by a higher, universal human paradigm: loneliness, unfulfilled love, old age and death. At a certain point in the film it no longer seemed to matter on which side of the border you find yourself."

This film is about the loss of borders, the loss of homeland, the loss of youth, the loss of love. Mit Verlust is zu rechnen (Losses to Be Expected) is seen by many as one of Ulrich Seidl's most tender films.