19/11/2024 - In her debut documentary, Carmen Trocker deconstructs a luxury Italian hotel, where staff negotiate demanding expectations while forging a supportive community

What happens “behind the scenes” of a hotel doesn’t stay behind the scenes, says Carmen Trocker in her first feature, the documentary Personale [+see also:
trailer
interview: Carmen Trocker
film profile], its title meaning “staff” or “personnel”. Trocker’s observational work, which has just had its world premiere in IDFA’s Luminous section, weaves between strands of transnationalism, unacknowledged labour and community. In this remaking of place and space, the film’s collection of snapshots deconstruct the luxurious façade, flipping a high-end hotel from a place of relaxation into an intense and sometimes precarious place of work.

The deceptively simple concept follows the daily work of the transnational, mostly female housekeeping staff (including Rodica Merlici, Ousmane Diarra, Olena Mokilak, Raimonda Kacbufi, Klodiana Dedej and Ibrahim Tounkara) of the Cavallino Bianco, a four-star family hotel in the Italian Dolomites of South Tyrol. Under the oversight of housekeeping governess Camelia Ungureanu, the personnel leader ensures that the crew toils – at some point, it is acknowledged that they are all overworked – to match the hotel’s desired aesthetic, down to the positioning of zipper pillows.

Between the everyday tasks of making up rooms and the far less savoury guest requests of cleaning up vomit-stained clothes, the staff find ways to connect across ages and cultures, even when most are conversing in their second, if not third or fourth, language. “It’s not my job; it’s our job,” says Ruth Siehi Monsekela, speaking to the fair sharing of responsibility. But this philosophy seems to apply to the whole of the hotel, where a rising tide lifts all boats. A young woman from Libya and a young man from Mali bond over where to celebrate Ramadan, while a group comforts each other over the cleaning of an expensive cashmere sweater gone wrong. In one scene, a group of three argues over who will water the flowers; in another, they high-five each other for a job well done. Every conversation brings something new in this nearly plotless film.

Trocker introduces the audience to her film language very early on, dedicating herself to an accessible sense of minimalism through very active sound design by Nora Czamler. Personale opens with a staff member straightening out chairs, with each squeak and whine of the metal on the ground grating against the viewer’s ears. Even when noise is relegated to ambient status, sound is always present: the roar of the industrial washing machines, the rustling of crisp, white sheets, the buzz of fluorescent lights.

DoP Małgorzata Szyłak’s camera is watchful but not voyeuristic, never rendering tasks too rhythmic or reductively fetishised so as to eliminate the agency of the personnel. The film’s long-take shots are hardly ever fully static, shifting slightly to follow the staff as they move around the space, allowing us to take in the workers’ lives as they appear. Conversely, precisely intercut shots of leftover cake and piles of rubbish are motionless, as if Trocker were creating still-life portraits. As Personale is filmed entirely inside the hotel, when a shot of the stunning green landscape around the building finally lands on screen, it feels deeply artificial. Trocker leaves the outside world out of focus and instead keeps crisp the pastel-pink window-box flowers, the literal fruits of the staff’s hard work.

In a late-film scene, two men wearing crisp, white button-downs – the hotel’s hospitality staff – pass two of our film’s subjects speaking Russian. One of the men even raises a quick eyebrow at the camera, as if to question the presence of a lens on these two women. This moment reminds us that what we’ve been privy to this whole time is something we’re not “meant to see”, but the importance of this act of witnessing and acknowledging lingers after the film ends. It’s not all beautiful, but at least there are shreds of beauty that can be found amidst real life.

Personale is a production by Trocker’s Bagarrefilm (Italy) and Mischief Films (Austria) in collaboration with Albolina Film (Italy), with filmdelights managing its world sales.