Hotel Royal is a fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed as a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.
We encounter a room attendant just as she is smoking the last cigarette before entering the hotel. From this point onwards, the perspective is hers, but her gaze is a supra-human one, capable of recording the spaces of the hallways and hotel rooms from ample, strange angles. This gaze penetrates every room, just like the user of a video game, in search of crucial evidence in each of the places that it discovers in its domestic chaos. “Hotel Royal” is a meditation on the (still) nature of hotels, onto which an allegory about work and death is superimposed with the use of a key element: the attendant’s aerosol machine. (Diana Smeu)
Salomé Lamas (Lisbon) studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam and is a Ph. D candidate in contemporary art studies in Coimbra. Her work has been screened both in art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, Locarno, BAFICI, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB – Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF among others.
FILM TITLE: HOTEL ROYAL
29′, 2021, Portugal
Director: SALOMÉ LAMAS
CAST: ANA MOREIRA, CARLOTO COTTA, TOMÁS ANTUNES
SCRIPTWRITER: SALOMÉ LAMAS, ISABEL PETTERMANN, ISABEL RAMOS
CINEMATOGRAPHY: RUI XAVIER
EDITING: SANDRO AGUILAR
SOUND: OLIVIER BLANC
PRODUCER: LUÍS URBANO, SANDRO AGUILAR
CO-PRODUCER: MÁRIO MICAELO
PRODUCTION COMPANY: CURTAS METRAGENS CRL, O SOM E A FURIA
WORLD SALES
AGÊNCIA – PORTUGUESE SHORT FILM AGENCY
T: +351 252 646683
E: agencia@curtas.pt
W : www.agencia.curtas.pt
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT:
E: salomelamas@hotmail.com