You enter a hotel through the observant anonymity of a receptionist and a chambermaid. The hotel becomes more than a setting, the act of looking becomes explicit.
Both Nightshift by Robina Rose and Hotel Royal by Salome Lamas use the conventions of documentary filmmaking while introducing constructed situations and fictional layers. In Nightshift, Rose stages her experience of working as a night receptionist at the Portobello Hotel in London, inviting members of the city’s punk and countercultural scene to inhabit the film’s nocturnal world. Drawing from the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hotel Royal approaches the space from an altogether more clinical and unsettling perspective of a chambermaid, building a place where the impossibility of communication makes observation the only available form of contact.
Following Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, the hotel becomes a space of transit, a place temporarily inhabited without establishing any lasting relationship with it.
The hotels we are presented in the films are intimate, yet anonymous, one registering the presence of people who drift in a performed atmosphere, the other assembled from fleeting encounters that accumulate into a strange archive of traces and imagined lives, both through the eyes of a worker who remains.
The chambermaid in Hotel Royal observes guests through the traces they leave behind in their rooms, their belongings and routines. Constructed methodically, her attention turns into a form of voyeurism, transforming fragments into speculative narratives. In a quieter, more unobtrusive way, the receptionist in Nightshift remains at the margins of her encounters, allowing the lives of passing guests to unfold.
The films leave gaps for the viewer to inhabit, without asking us to simply witness a reality that has already been established. “There’s no need to reinvent the world; paying close attention is enough”, the chambermaid tells us.
Calup propus de Gabriela Cardoș, Monica Dănilă și Andreea Chiper pentru Her Docs, Varșovia. Proiect dezvoltat în Rezidența F-SIDES Wildcards 2026 – un program de formare dedicat curatoriatului de film, conceput ca un laborator de idei în care participanții își dezvoltă propriile concepte curatoriale în dialog cu profesioniști din industrie și cu rețele internaționale de cinema.
