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still Safari (Ulrich Seidl, AT 2016)

Safari

Ulrich Seidl / AT, 2016 / 91 min.

A vacation film about murder, and a film that delves into human nature: this is how Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl describes his extremely unsettling, tragicomic documentary on big game hunting by white tourists in Africa. What motivates these people?

poster Safari (Ulrich Seidl, AT 2016)

Grown-up people who see killing wild animals in the savanna as comparable to an annual skiing holiday. In their tropical outfits, they talk about the rituals they perform before taking a shot, and the feeling of release when they find a cadaver. Every year, they can be found in the wildlife reservations of South Africa and Namibia, clutching a beer, waiting for hours having paid to shoot a lion, a zebra or a giraffe. What motivates these people?

Ulrich Seidl: "With Safari I wasn't interested in showing the wealthy, the aristocrats, the sheikhs and the oligarchs hunting big game in Africa, but rather the normal, the ordinary hunter. For many years now, hunting in Africa has been affordable for the average citizen of the west. I set out to discover and portray what motivates such people to hunt, and why they can even become obsessed by it. But along the way the film also became a film about killing. About killing for pleasure without ever facing danger, about killing as a kind of emotional liberation."

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Details

Persons under 16 years must be accompanied by an adultScenes from this movie may cause fearThis movie contains foul language

Director

Ulrich Seidl

Production year

2016

Country

AT

Original title

Safari

Length

91 min.

Language

German

Subtitles

ENG or NLD

Format

DCP

Part of

Ulrich Seidl

Eye Filmmuseum presents Ulrich Seidl – Über das Leben, die Liebe und den Tod, the first exhibition – and the first complete film overview – of the renowned Austrian filmmaker in the Netherlands. Featuring a wealth of early, little-known and newly commissioned (film) works, the exhibition confronts visitors with the lives of a number of seemingly ordinary individuals, people who try to, in their own ways, make something of life in a late-capitalist society in which meaning has been replaced by consumerism.

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campaign image Ulrich Seidl
still Safari (Ulrich Seidl, AT 2016)
still Safari (Ulrich Seidl, AT 2016)
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Upcoming exhibition

  • 19 September 2026 — 31 January 2027

    Ulrich Seidl

    Über das Leben, die Liebe und den Tod

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