2023–2024
Film essay, 18 minutes, Arabic, colour, stereo
Co-directed, produced and researched with Magnus Bärtås
On Hospitality: Layla Al-Attar and Hotel Al-Rasheed is a necromantic film essay centred on the Iraqi artist Layla Al-Attar and a luxury hotel constructed in Baghdad by a large network of Swedish companies led by Skanska. The hotel was intended to host the 1983 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. The summit never took place in Baghdad because of the Iran–Iraq War, but the building later became internationally visible as a base for foreign journalists during the Gulf War.
Furniture, glass, architectural records, industrial documentation and news footage are treated in the film as active historical materials rather than neutral evidence. They connect the hotel’s architecture to Swedish industrial labour, Iraqi state representation, war, diplomacy, surveillance and the production of global media images.
The film is narrated through a constructed voice associated with Layla Al-Attar, performed by the Swedish-Iraqi artist Areej Almansory. This voice does not claim to reproduce Al-Attar’s testimony or resolve the silences surrounding her life and death. Instead, it moves through the uncertain space between surviving evidence, historical narration and artistic speculation.
One of the film’s central objects is the floor mosaic of George H. W. Bush installed at the hotel entrance after the Gulf War. The mosaic is frequently attributed to Al-Attar, but the available archival accounts are contradictory. Rather than resolving this uncertainty, the film keeps the disputed attribution visible and asks how images acquire authorship, political force and historical authority.
On Hospitality develops necromancy as an artistic research method for approaching histories in which first-person testimony is impossible. The method does not claim to make the dead speak. It constructs a provisional narrative position from which archival fragments, objects and unresolved accounts can enter into relation. Hospitality consequently appears as an unstable political condition: the hotel welcomes diplomats and journalists while becoming entangled with authoritarian representation, warfare and the management of visibility.
Recognition
The film received the Main Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at the 70th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2024. The jury recognised its cinematic treatment of historical possibility, political power and the limits of narration.
It was nominated for the 2024 Guldbagge Award for Best Short Film by the Swedish Film Institute.
On Hospitality entered the collection of Moderna Museet in 2026.
Exhibitions and screenings
The work was commissioned for Round Here, curated by Christina Zetterlund, and premiered with an installation at Designarkivet in Nybro. Screenings have included Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Loods6 in Amsterdam, Rencontres Paris/Berlin, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Best of Short Film Festivals in Cologne, and Movies on War in Elverum.
