Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise" Trilogy Pushes Boundaries The work of Ulrich Seidl can perhaps be summed up by his preferred camera perspective: head-on, often boxed in, warts and all. This Austrian filmmaker has made a 30-year career of confronting us with people you don't usually see on screen (much less naked) and stories you don't expect to see played out. Scenes from his latest project, the "Paradise" trilogy, depict a part-time Catholic missionary rousing the ire of a belligerent drunk, an adolescent girl at a weight-loss clinic pining for her doctor, and middle-aged sex tourists manhandling their Kenyan boy toy. Writing about "Paradise: Love," the first segment of the trilogy, in The Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen said Mr. Seidl had created characters that were effectively "inhuman puppets for his amusement" in a film that gave off "a feeling of unearned, defensive superiority." That's been a common complaint, but the countervailing viewpoint has existed at least since Mr. Seidl began a new phase after years in documentary filmmaking. Responding to his 2001 fiction-feature debut, the critic Scott Foundas wrote, "What some detect as cruelty in "Dog Days" is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism." Mr. Seidl continues to get his films made and noticed amid heavy competition after a decade of boundary pushing by the likes of Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier and Carlos Reygadas. Among his ardent admirers are the Nobel literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek and John Waters, neither of them strangers to affronts to taste. Speaking of a scene in "Dog Days" in which two men torment a women, Mr. Seidl, 60, said by phone from Vienna, "There are people who believe that things that shouldn't be there mustn't be shown." What is often forgotten, however, is that Mr. Seidl doesn't come up with these daunting scenarios on his own. From "Dog Days" to the female-centered "Paradise" trilogy - the second installment, "Paradise: Faith," opens on Aug. 23 in New York and Los Angeles - he has collaborated with his co-writer and wife, Veronika Franz. Ms. Franz, a film journalist for the Austrian newspaper Kurier, started out with reservations. After watching "Animal Love," Mr. Seidl's 1996 documentary about intimately obsessive pet owners, in 1996, she said, she was speechless. "I thought, "I don't want to meet the man who made this film," " she recalled, chuckling and lobbing mischievous asides in a joint interview with Mr. Seidl. Ms. Franz eventually came around, and the "Paradise" films had their premieres at major festivals in the last year and a half, and rights were purchased for American distribution last fall. The trilogy came into being after a year of trying to mold 90 hours of film into one giant feature - an extreme example of Mr. Seidl's finding the shape of his movies in the editing. The first installment, "Paradise: Love," which opened in the United States in April, follows a woman to the Kenyan coast, where she falls for a male prostitute. "Attuned to the moral complexity of the situation, and also surprisingly tender," Pamela Jahn wrote in Sight & Sound; in the same magazine, Catherine Wheatley said the film "begs questions about exploitation." In "Faith," a conservative Catholic hospital worker proselytizes door to door while fending off her Muslim paraplegic ex-husband at home. The final part, "Hope," scheduled for release in October, is about an amiable girl, the daughter of the sex tourist, who looks for love in the wrong place at camp. The three female protagonists grapple with desires, doubts and threats to their self-expression. "Ulrich is as interested as strongly in women as he is in men - that always fascinated me," said Ms. Franz, who still remembers getting taken to task by feminist critics over "Dog Days." That makes it easier as a woman to write and create with him together, because you don't have to fight this gender war. In "Paradise: Faith," Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter) preaches to uninterested or violent strangers and practices self-flagellation. Her husband (played by Nabil Saleh, a taxi driver who is not paraplegic) resents her independence, hurling insults and worse. Making the film wasn't always easy either, thanks to Mr. Seidl's method of conducting research, plunging into open-ended scenarios and filming the results. Ms. Hofstätter's scenes of Anna Maria's missionary rounds were filmed in actual apartments. "I was knocking on the doors of people who didn't know there was a film going on," she said. I had to have conversations about religious questions even though I had never met them. At one point, she feared that one drunken woman might actually strike her. "Faith" was largely based on a woman Mr. Seidl filmed for his 2003 documentary about religious practices, "Jesus, You Know." Ms. Hofstätter shadowed that woman as she made her rounds, and she and Mr. Seidl drew on memories of their own upbringings. "My family was so very Catholic that we had priests who were members of the family, and nuns sewed priests" habits for my older brother and me," Mr. Seidl said. We read the Mass and even played Mass. So he was the priest, and I was his assistant. A fan of religious art, he also acknowledged visual similarities between his shots and the tableau style of altarpiece paintings. "From the dramaturge's point of view, you have life, you have dying, you have sex, you have birth," he said. Yet when "Faith" had its premiere last year at the Venice Film Festival, it provoked charges of blasphemy. Even its American distributor, Strand Releasing, has been the target of a letter-writing campaign, although the response in Austria was relatively muted. Mr. Seidl's collaborators, including Ms. Hofstätter, stand behind his films. Ed Lachman, who shot Mr. Seidl's 2007 documentary "Import/Export" and worked on "Paradise" with the cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler, compared the filmmaker to the director of another trilogy, Krzysztof Kieslowski. "I always say Ulrich is moral without being moralistic," said Mr. Lachman, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in Todd Haynes's "Far From Heaven" (2002). Ms. Franz recognizes that the disturbing aspects of the films might invite other comparisons. Mr. Seidl will be producing her first fiction feature, a genre film with echoes of the 1960 surgery shocker "Eyes Without a Face" that he sums up as "art house and horror." She elaborated with a laugh. "With Ulrich's films," she said, "you take one step further, and you have a horror movie."