It’s bad to lie to people, but it’s worse to lie to yourself, someone used to tell me. Being a lonely and sloppy middle-age Austrian woman is far from paradise, but if, in addition, you intend to go to the Kenian coast in search of a young African true-love, the roller coaster of expectations, reality and frustration is more likely to take you to a hell of emotions. In the meanwhile, you might have certain moments of happiness, disguised in sexual pleasure and comradeship.

This movie is about self-deceive and the condition of the hegemonic-subaltern that keeps on existing in Africa and in so many other places. One of the achievements of the director, Ulrich Seidl, is the successful depiction of unstable human motivations and their even more erratic and (un)expected behavior. He masterly alternates both sides of the story: Teresa’s hurting solitude and the disrespectful treatment that she grants her black “lovers”.