On the beaches of Kenya they‘re known as “Sugar Mamas”: European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise. She goes from one Beach Boy to the next, from one disappointment to the next and finally she must recognize: On the beaches of Kenya love is a business.

Paradise: Love tells not without humor of sex tourism, older women and young men, the market value of sexuality, the power of skin color, Europe and Africa, and the exploited, who have no choice but to exploit others. Ulrich Seidl‘s film is the opener in the Paradise Trilogy about three women in one family who take separate vacations: one as a sex tourist, another as a Catholic missionary (Paradise: Faith) and the third at a diet camp for teenagers (Paradise: Hope). Three films, three women, three stories of the longing to find happiness today.

“His boldest and most ambitious work to date—a confrontational yet oddly compassionate meditation on the residual chasm between Europe and its former colonies, profound loneliness in the so-called communication age, and the infinite varieties of the human body.” —Scott Foundas, Film Comment