Great Exhibitions #24 — Ulrich Seidl: Life, Love and Death

The Story

**📅 Sunday, 18 October 2026** **🕒 15:00** **📍 In front of Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam** Beautiful bodies. Ugly bodies. Lonely people. Strange desires. Pets, basements, holidays, religion, sex, consumerism, death. And an uncomfortable question running through all of it: **are we looking at these people — or at ourselves?** For **Great Exhibitions #24**, we’re heading to Eye Filmmuseum for **Ulrich Seidl — Über das Leben, die Liebe und den Tod**, the first exhibition in the Netherlands devoted to one of the most distinctive filmmakers in contemporary European cinema. Eye accompanies it with the first complete Dutch retrospective of his films. For more than three decades, the Austrian filmmaker has occupied a strange territory somewhere between **documentary and fiction, observation and staging, cruelty and tenderness**. His subjects are often people cinema prefers not to show: old bodies, overweight bodies, outsiders, obsessive collectors, sex tourists, religious fanatics, people looking for affection in animals, objects, rituals or other people. Seidl photographs them with an almost unnerving formal precision. The result can be funny. It can be grotesque. It can be deeply moving. And it is very often all three at once. ### 🎥 Inside Seidl's world The exhibition follows Seidl's work from his early hybrid documentaries through his feature films, using material from across his career on a large audiovisual installation. At its centre is his recurring interest in apparently ordinary people trying to find **love, happiness, intimacy and meaning**inside a late-capitalist society increasingly organised around consumption. Eye describes the exhibition as an exploration of the *condition humaine* and of the prejudices we bring to the way other people live. And that is where Seidl becomes particularly interesting. His work has often been accused of being exploitative or misanthropic: of inviting us to laugh at vulnerable, eccentric or socially marginal people

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