Trivia

About her explicit nude sex scenes, Margarete Tiesel said, "Standing face to face with these young men makes you feel ten years younger and back on the market. I felt like a desirable woman and I really enjoyed that. I understand any woman who drives down there and finds a lover".

Paradise: Liebe is the first installment in Seidl's Paradise trilogy, a project first conceived as one film with three parallel stories. The other two films in the trilogy are Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope.

The cast combines both professional and non-professional actors. All the roles of the white women were played by professional actors, whereas all the black men, the so-called "beach boys", were non-professional.

Casting of the lead actress took one year before Margarethe Tiesel won the part. "From the beginning I knew I wanted to work with a professional actor for the main role. But the job description was extremely demanding. A woman over fifty who doesn't correspond to the usual Western beauty ideals, in that she's overweight, for example. As usual with my method, she had to possess the ability to improvise scenes and to appear authentic on camera. And then there was the greatest difficulty: She had to shoot nude sex scenes, fall for these young black men.," director Ulrich Seidl said. "A few weeks before we started the shooting, I went to Africa with three actresses, one after the other: I wanted them to try out on site, so I could find out right there how they would communicate with African men, how they would touch the skin of African men, and things of that kind.It was only then that I decided in favour of Margarete Tiesel."

Principal photography of the whole three-part project took place between 22 October 2009 and 14 September 2010 in Kenya and Vienna. Everything was shot on location so that real events could be captured along with the fictitious content.