Bettina Haasen: Hotel Sahara
Mauritania, Nouadhibou, a place at the coast, a place from where Africans want to go to the promised land, Europe, and from where many boats are leaving and have left, with people on board… with many tragic drowning events as a result. Many never made it.
Extremely well shot and produced, this film takes the audience to a place and an atmosphere of Waiting and to characters, who open their hearts and reveal their dreams to the camera. It’s a film with the ambition to describe a collective, it has the structure of a collage, it gives information, there is a respect for the characters so it understandable and well deserved that the film travels so well – visit the site of the film – as a reference point of one of the most actual problems of today.
But it is also a film that some times, though not all the time, seems to have been taken over by the cameraman. The images are so well composed and constructed (stranded ship wrecks, the Sahara landscape, sequences that play with light and the ocean in several angles, purely aesthetically thought and not really serving any narrative purpose), that they once in a while kill the contents and do not involve the audience emotionally.
Germany, 2008, 52 & 85 mins. (I saw the shorter version)
