Rimini

Richie Bravo, once upon a time a successful Austrian pop star, chases after his faded fame in wintry Rimini, Italy. He funds his dissolute lifestyle and addiction to gambling with concerts for busloads of German-speaking tourists and sexual favors for his female fans.

His world starts to collapse when his adult daughter suddenly breaks into his life and demands money that she feels he owes her. Meanwhile, his elderly father, who suffers from dementia, goes round and round in circles in an Austrian nursing home as his condition steadily declines.

“A shiveringly precise slow burn that continues to burrow new tunnels in the mind long after it ends…This is not, in the end, a tale of hubris brought low, or even of a tacky life staring down a long lens at a tawdry, dwindling death. Instead it’s a chilling parable about the sins of the father becoming the punishments of the son, and about the moral arc of the universe bending, across generations, toward the coldest justice imaginable.” - Variety

“It could be sentimental, this “winter journey” to the graveyard of dreams and desire. It could be a settling of scores, a satire, an exposé. But it never is. We’re in an Ulrich Seidl movie. And at the end we sit silently in our seats.” - WELT Online

“There is a kind of brilliance in it. [Rimini] is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.” - The Guardian

“Ulrich Seidl finds the real drama.” - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“Rimini shows that a director does not have to like his characters. But he has to love them, and then he can tell us anything.” - Die Zeit