General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

In the Basement

In the Basement (German: Im Keller) is a 2014 Austrian documentary film directed by Ulrich Seidl and co-written with Veronika Franz, in which Austrians describe and demonstrate what they do in their basements, from model railways and brass-band rehearsals to shooting ranges, sadomasochistic dungeons, and a private museum of Nazi memorabilia.¹^•² It premiered out of competition at the 71st Venice International Film Festival in 2014 and was Seidl's return to documentary form after his fiction trilogy Paradise (2012).³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Im Keller; Austria, 2014, documentary in German¹
Director and writers	Directed by Ulrich Seidl; script-concept by Seidl and Veronika Franz¹
Runtime	85 minutes (digital); festival listings also give 81–82 minutes⁴^•³
Premiere	71st Venice International Film Festival, 2014, out of competition³
Austrian release	26 September 2014, distributed by Stadtkino Filmverleih; 19,559 admissions¹
Box office	$186,036 worldwide, of which $177,369 in Austria and $3,643 in the United States⁵
Reception	87% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (15 reviews); 60% audience Popcornmeter⁶
Awards	Vienna Film Prize 2015; OÖ-Nachrichten Documentary Film of the Year Audience Award 2015⁴

Spoilers

Subject and approach

The film sets out to depict Austrians' relationships with their basements and to ask whether Austrian basements have specific characteristics at all.¹ Seidl's stated premise is that in Austria the basement is a locus of free time and the private sphere, where people pursue hobbies, passions, and obsessions away from view, and that in the unconscious it is also "a place of darkness, a place of fear, a place of human abysses."⁴

The people shown include a man who sings operatic arias in his underground shooting range, a brass-band circle that drinks beneath portraits of Hitler and King Ludwig, a couple living out a mistress-and-slave relationship, a woman who keeps and cradles lifelike baby dolls, and a hunter of exotic species.⁷^•⁸ The Austrian Film Institute describes the film as an essay that is both funny and sad, using Seidl's characteristic film tableaux to delve into the underground of the Austrian soul.⁹

Form. The IDFA catalog describes it as an essayist film that blurs the boundary between observation and reenactment. The "Seidl Tableaus" film subjects front on, framed in symmetrical spaces like portrait paintings looking back at the viewer, and these reflective punctuations interrupt observational scenes of basement activities and interviews.² The Ji.hlava festival notes that the viewer remains uncertain as to how much the scenes were staged.¹⁰ In an interview, Seidl said his main task was gaining access to places kept secret; the most effective principle was to look for people who wanted to reveal something, which meant knocking on doors in residential areas and placing ads and flyers. The so-called "Nazi cellar" turned up by chance.¹¹

Production

Seidl, born 1952 in Vienna, began his career with documentaries such as Good News (1990), Animal Love (1995), and Models (1998), and his first feature Dog Days won the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 2001.¹² The idea for In the Basement grew out of location research for Dog Days, when he noticed that basements in detached suburban houses were often more spaciously laid out than the living rooms and that men in particular spent their spare time there.¹¹ He has said the film was not prompted, as people might assume, by the Kampusch or Fritzl cases.¹¹

Shooting took place from February to May 2009, with completion in winter 2010, on locations in Vienna and Lower Austria.¹ The film was produced by Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion with coop99, funded by the Austrian Film Institute, Filmfonds Wien, and Land Niederösterreich, with television investment from ORF and WDR and collaboration with Arte.¹^•⁴ Martin Gschlacht was the cinematographer, Christoph Brunner the editor, and Ekkehart Baumung the sound engineer.¹ The cast of nonprofessional subjects includes Fritz Lang, Alfreda Klebinger, Inge and Manfred Ellinger, Josef Ochs, Alessa and Gerald Duchek, Cora Kitty, Peter Vokurek, and Walter Holzer.⁴

Release and reception

After the Venice premiere on August 29, 2014, the film screened at festivals including San Sebastián, Zurich, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal, the London Film Festival, IDFA in Amsterdam, and many others.¹³^•⁴ It opened in Austrian cinemas on September 26, 2014.¹ Strand Releasing released it in the United States on November 6, 2015, with a domestic gross of $3,643.⁵

Political scandal. According to Seidl's own film page, the film led in 2014 to a political scandal that raged for weeks and the resignation of several Austrian politicians; a German-language interview identifies two ÖVP local politicians who had to step down from their posts after appearing in the film.⁴^•¹⁴

Critics responded strongly to the film's mixture of comedy and discomfort. The Chicago Reader review called it "a brisk, bracing, and often very funny film about the seeds of fascism in contemporary Austrian society," and the New York Times described a movie that "descends into the unseen spaces of Austrian homes, literally and figuratively, and creates a stage for their residents' fantasies of sex, violence and power."⁶ German-language reviews quoted by the director praised it as "a sublime film" (Die Zeit) and "Seidl's best film in a long time" (KINO-ZEIT.DE).⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Documentary films by subject: people, identity, and communities

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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