Grande Hotel
Lotte Stoops
2010 - 70 min - Vidéo HD - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - Belgique

Berta still doesn’t feel at home in Portugal. Her musings take us to her real ‘home’: the city of Beira. Here resides the Grande Hotel, an eyewitness to colonialism, a revolutionary and a civil war. This megalomaneous pride and joy of the colonial regime, built in 1955, was doomed to fail. This monster of 12,000 square metres only had 110 extremely luxury rooms. It could not pay off. 60 years later, it is the home of more than 2,500 ‘permanent’ guests. Everything that could be converted for housing is used. Moises worked his way up in the hierarchy of the internal social organization and therefore knows the Grande Hotel’s goings by heart. The residents have few contact with the outside world and form an - to avoid - enclave. Gradually the coloured past of the hotel and thus of Mozambique, seeps in.
Archive footage but also the anecdotal stories we hear on images of the hotel today, bring the paradox to life. They tell us how this empty building got populated during the civil war and the major floods in Mozambique. They unveil the revolutionary history of this country and the traces it left behind at the hotel. But besides destruction there is also construction, and therefore hope. Moises helped to build the new mosque and barbershop in the hotel complex. And together with his wife Eliza, he runs a small shop.
But what has to become of all these people, trapped in their current situation? The dreams and wishes of the protagonists for their future alternate with what the ghosts have in mind for the building: from a controlled implosion, a glorious state museum to a university of the people.