XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Saturday 19 May 2012

Graphic film on female sex tourists cheered in Cannes - European women sex tourists and African gigolos -

Graphic film on female sex tourists cheered in Cannes - European women sex tourists and African gigolos - 




A graphic, unflinching look at the delicate interplay of desire, money and power among European women sex tourists and African gigolos hit the screen yesterday in the Cannes contender "Paradise: Love".
Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, who scandalised cinema's top international showcase five years ago with another take on rich and poor and the sex trade, "Import/Export", this time turns his camera on women as the consumers.
"Paradise: Love" stars Margarethe Tiesel as Teresa, a 50-year-old Viennese single mother of an insolent teenage daughter who needs a break from it all, in a breakout performance cheered by audiences here.
She sets off alone to the white sandy coast of eastern Kenya where she falls in with a group of "sugar mamas", fellow middle-aged women who feel neglected at home and seek the attention of much younger local men in exchange for cash.
"It is about female loneliness that takes hold when you reach a certain age and no longer look like someone from an advert," Tiesel told reporters.
"The exploited begin to exploit in a place where they have power. I don't judge these women, I understand them and I understand completely what they struggle with."
Tiesel, an accomplished stage actress in her first major film role, appears nude through much of the picture and has various on-screen couplings with Kenyan "beach boys" that leave little to the imagination.
She said her faith in Seidl as a director gave her the confidence to expose herself to such an extent.
"Ulrich told me from the beginning, 'Nothing will happen that you don't want to happen, Frau Tiesel'," she said.
Teresa begins tentatively at first, breaking off a tryst with an insistent lover when he goes too fast for her.
But she soon meets Munga (Peter Kuzungu), a dreadlocked charmer and a willing student in the ways of Western seduction.
However as their affair continues, his demands for money become more frequent as he describes the plight of his poor "sister" and her baby.
When Teresa finds out the woman is actually his wife, she flies into a jealous rage and beats him in front of the other guests on the hotel's palm-lined beach.
Duped and disappointed, she steels herself to ferociously pursue beach boys with little regard for their dignity, or her own.
Seidl, one of 22 directors competing for the top prize at Cannes this year -- all of them men, said many Western women were looking for more than a holiday fling, a key difference to male sex tourism in developing countries.




Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/graphic-film-on-female-sex-tourists-cheered-in-cannes/story-e6frfkui-1226360720257

Crooks target Supreme Court Justice Breyer for second time in three months -

Crooks target Supreme Court Justice Breyer for second time in three months - 
Stephen Breyer Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer testifies before the House Judiciary Committee's Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee on Capitol Hill May 20, 2010 in Washington, DC. Breyer and fellow Associate Justice Antonin Scalia testified to the subcommittee about the Administrative Conference of the United States.

Less than three months after he was robbed at his vacation home in the Caribbean, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has been targeted again -- this time by burglars at his Washington, D.C., house.
Breyer's property was raided May 4, The Washington Post reported Thursday, with cutlery and candlesticks worth about $3,500 taken.
Unlike the February robbery in Nevis -- where Breyer and his house guests were threatened with a machete by a gardener who took $1,000 -- no one was home during the Washington robbery. A housekeeper discovered the crime scene.
A Supreme Court spokeswoman said no court documents were taken.
The robbery comes a month after Congress allocated nearly $1 million to hire 12 new Supreme Court police officers, according to The Hill.
Breyer had been among the group pushing for that greater protection after U.S. District Judge John Roll was among six people killed in a gunman's rampage at a Tucson shopping mall last year, which seriously wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 12 others.




Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/17/crooks-target-supreme-court-justice-breyer-for-second-time-in-three-months/?test=latestnews