Graphic film on female sex tourists cheered in Cannes

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.

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.

"This is about our society in the first place and asking why women like Teresa find themselves so lonely. They go to these places where they think they can get what they need -- their desire for happiness, sexuality and tenderness," he said.

"Women from the rich West exploit young African men. But it's also a business, and they (the men) get something for it."

"Paradise" revisits ground covered in the trailblazing 2005 film "Heading South" starring Charlotte Rampling and set in a Haitian resort but critics hailed a fresh approach to the rich subject matter.

"Import/Export" dealt with women from the former Soviet Union working in the West as prostitutes and featured a notorious scene in which an amateur actress performed on-screen oral sex on an actor after being made to crawl on all-fours and bark like a dog.