Hotel Royal, Project 2020–2021
[HR 2020-2021, Hotel Royal 2021 – Core of the Project]
Hotel Royal, Project (2020–2021) comprises the installation HR (2020—2021) and the film Hotel Royal (2021) – core of the project.Hotel Royal is a fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs, or simply about misfits.
'In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed, through the details, lives that will remain unknown', says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualized quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupt this dynamic.
The project was self-initiated. The other productions were developed due to other partners and exhibited accordingly.
HOTEL ROYAL (2021)
4K HD video, 2:39, color, Dolby 5.1 sound, 30 min., Portugal
Production: O Som e a Fúria
Coproduction: Curtas Metragens CRL
Development support: Yaddo, Brown Foundation - Dora Maar House
Additional support: Hotel do Mar, MRôlo, Cerna da Vitória, Nevada Bob´s Gold
Support: ICA – Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual
HR (2020-2021 )
HR (2020-2021 )
Installation, stereo sound 25 min., 7 A4 letter paper, Portugal
Hahnemühle Photo Luster 300 gsm. 70x 90 cm, Portugal
Production: Lamaland
Coproduction: Kubikgallery
Produced with materials from Hotel Royal (2021)
Salomé Lamas has amassed an impressive body of work, alternating between international festival circuits and art galleries. Her films suggest an eye for the ethnographic, blending fact and fiction with an acute interest in the nature of spaces, particularly what they represent and what a human presence, or lack of it, implies. ‘Hotel Royal’ is a complete work of fiction, yet it draws heavily from the conditions of its creation, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to what most would imagine the film was written and produced prior to the pandemic althought strangely fitting the scenario that would come next.
[…]
In a scene merely described, a young boy uses the hotel computer and provides Siri with a litany of questions and statements: “Siri what is love?”, “Siri, I am sad”. In perhaps the film’s most crushing moment the boy professes to Siri: “I can’t see you”. Amidst the questions raised regarding death and the pandemic, this scene best encapsulates the ethos of ‘Hotel Royal’. A world, not unlike our own, where human contact is so detached physically and emotionally that it’s experienced in the third person, where we can only understand others by the objects they leave behind, where we can only see but not touch, or hear and not see. As the narrator muses: “I’ve always liked objects, they’re easier than people”.
Matthew Chan, Hotel Royal: Liminal spaces
As a metronome clicks off the seconds of her day, the chambermaid narrates the various contents of each room, a set of stories implied by objects temporarily abandoned by their owners. Itinerant labor is the unseen force that drives both the film and the functioning of the hotel itself, and Moreira emphasizes her detachment from everything she sees. She is not interested in fantasy, envisioning herself entering the secret lives of others. That's because her time, and to some extent her consciousness, are already bought and paid for.
Leftovers, Michael Sicinski
'Hotel Royal' fits in Lamas’ body of work because it demonstrates her preoccupation with limits and boundaries; the short scrutinizes the quotidian to the point of deconstruction. This conceptual framework in which belongings reveal not just facts but vulnerability has an impersonal approach to it, Lamas opting for detached, controlled storytelling to a nuttier one.
Andreea Patru, Paying attention: Hotel Royal by salomé lamas