Together with Magnus Bärtås
In On Hospitality – Layla Al Attar and Hotel Al-Raheed, the Iraqi artist Layla Al-Attar returns from the dead to tell the story of how a Swedish company built a luxurious hotel in Baghdad, ordered by Saddam Hussein for the 1983 summit of the Non-Alignment Movement. War changed the plans. Layla made a mosaic at the entrance of the hotel, depicting George Bush’s face and the large inscription “Bush is a criminal.”. She was killed in 1993 along with her husband and a housekeeper when an American missile hit her house. In this film, an experiment unfolds that could be described as necromancy: the dead returning to speak to the living about the past, the present, and possible futures. Necromancy, in this sense, becomes an integral part of historiography, using imagination based on archival sources to speculate about the contexts of history. The construction of the hotel in Baghdad was a vast Swedish industrial undertaking at the beginning of the 80s, now largely forgotten. Led by the company Skanska in Kalmar, it involved over a thousand firms, many of them small businesses from the province of Småland. The film uses original artefacts (furniture and glass pieces) from the interior of the hotel, as well as documentary material (by Skanska and others).* The summit of the Non-Aligned Movement never took place, as the Iran–Iraq War erupted. But the hotel’s historical significance peaked during the Gulf War: Hotel Al-Rasheed became the setting of the world’s first televised war. On Hospitality won the First Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.
Statement of the Jury: “This film, which we chose first after much deliberation, builds a multi-layered architecture out of the possibilities and impossibilities of history. A voice from beyond and footsteps on the inlays of ideology take us into a narrative prism that allows us to understand the complexities of our present and the depths of power. The Hotel Al-Rasheed, with its 1001 rooms, offers the filmmakers just enough space to show us how to think, explore, and feel cinematically.”
On Hospitality was screened at (together with an installation) at Designarkivet, Nybro and Designcenter, Malmö. During 2024 has been screened at Uppsala Kortfilmsfestival (International Competition), Loods6 in Amsterdam, Rencontres Paris/Berlin in Paris, Moderna Museet (curated by Filmform), Best of Short Film Festivals in Cologne, and Movies on War in Elverum, Norway (International Competition). It was nominated for a Guldbagge (Golden Beetle) by the Swedish Film Institute for Best Short Film in Sweden, 2024
