Ulrich Seidl will present "Wicked Games Rimini Sparta" at Intl. rotterdam film festival

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, who faced allegations of on-set irregularities and Child Exploitation Last year, will attend the world premiere of a "new" film, titled "Wicked Games Rimini Sparta", at the Intl. Rotterdam Film Festival later this month. Seidl has strenuously denied the allegations against him.

A festival spokesperson told Variety the plan was Seidl would arrive at the festival on January 29 and stay three nights, but details were still being finalized. IFFR runs from January 25 to February 25. 5.

The new 205-minute film combines footage from its 2022 twin films "Rimini" and "Sparta", the latter being at the center of the allegations. In the films, Seidl follows the lives of two brothers, Richie and Ewald, respectively. The former is a crooner, long past his prime but still loved by hordes of middle-aged female fans who can buy his sexual services; the latter is a technician living in Romania and struggling with his pedophile desires.

A description of the new film on the festival website, written by German critic and programmer Olaf Möller , states that when Seidl first started working on the stories, they "were meant to be told in a movie - and now they finally are!"

Möller adds that "Wicked Games Rimini Sparta" offers "an incredibly different experience from the story(s). C is much more cerebral, it is above all a work of ideas."

In the first wintry motion of the film, "the two strands are intertwined," says Möller, " reflecting, complementing each other in a devastating and dark vision of lost childhood as a state of mind."

The second summer movement, he says, is "focused on Ewald and the Spartan fantasies he lives with a gang of boys in a fortress they are building, now seen as a sublimation of his father's obsession with German fascism that has him spouting Nazi songs and slogans when he can barely remember nothing else. Meanwhile, the father of a little Spartan tries to "turn the boy against Ewald by brutally 'educating' him to embrace evil."

All of this, the reviewer says, makes the new film "more disconcerting, inconsolable and heartbroken, but also in many ways a richer version of the project.”

Allegations of on-set irregularities and child exploitation against Seidl and "Sparta" were released on September 1. 2 in the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The inquest alleged that Seidl failed to communicate the film's pedophilia theme to its young actors, ages 9 to 16 and not from professional backgrounds. It is also alleged that the actors faced alcoholism, nudity and violence during production without adequate preparation and support.

Der Spiegel said its reporters spent more than six months investigating the production of "Sparta in Germany and Austria and Romania, and spoke to dozens of crew members, including some actors.

Seidl's lawyer tells Der Spiegel there is no sexual context nor any pornographic or pedophile scenes in the film. The lawyer also denied that any child was "filmed naked or in a sexualized situation, pose or context".

In a statement addressing the allegations posted on his official website, Seidl wrote that the film is based on a true story, and follows an Austrian in his forties who moves to a remote part of the country to start a new life and, together with a group of young local boys, turns a dilapidated school into a fortress.

Throughout the process, however, the man is forced to "confront a truth he has long been repressed, one that neither the boys nor the outside world suspects. Inside, he is secretly battling his pedophile impulses,” Seidl writes.

Commenting on the allegations, the director wrote: "My films are not the product of my manipulation of my actors, distorting the film...