GOOD NEWS

Good News is a dialectic essay in which the squalid conditions of immigrants who sell newspapers in Vienna's outer districts are juxtaposed with observations of well-to-do Viennese tabloid readers. Ulrich Seidl's camera captures the pathetic subjects in stylised tableaux, lingering within static frames for uncomfortable lengths of time. (...) Structurally, Good News makes ironic the symbiotic relation between the distribution and consumption of news in Vienna, that is, between the immigrant sellers and the partially xenophobic buyers. The film posits that both ultimately exist on the edge of society. (Mattias Frey)