October 1–31, 2025
e-flux Film is pleased to present Hotel Royal by Salomé Lamas as the October 2025 edition of our online series Staff Picks.
Filmed in a seaside hotel where each room seems haunted by its absent guests, Hotel Royal follows a chambermaid whose carefully repeated routines turn into an exercise in close observation. Through fixed shots and repeated framings—beds left unmade, objects displaced, traces of unseen lives—Lamas turns the routines of housekeeping into a meditation on intimacy, intrusion, and the unstable line between fiction and reality. Oscillating between documentary-like attention and staged construction, the film represents Lamas’s notion of “parafiction,” a mode of inquiry into how images produce social meaning. Premiered in Locarno’s Corti d’autore and later screened at the Viennale, Hotel Royal combines formal cinematic rigor with unsettling ambiguity, asking what cinema can reveal and what it inevitably leaves concealed.
Film
Salomé Lamas, Hotel Royal (2021, 30 minutes)
As the chambermaid of a large seaside hotel (played by actress Ana Moreira) performs her cleaning duties, she lives vicariously through the belongings that each guest leaves in their room. A cold and mediated life, in which the chambermaid’s analytical method encloses her further and further into a form of self-imposed isolation. Until everything changes.
Hotel Royal will stream on e-flux Film until October 31, 2025. View the film here.
This Staff Picks edition is organized with the support of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Agência da Curta Metragem / Portuguese Short Film Agency; O Som e a Furia.
Salomé Lamas is a Portuguese filmmaker and visual artist whose work circulates between cinema and contemporary art, often exploring the porous boundary between document and fiction. Describing her approach as “parafictions,” she develops research-driven projects that test how images shape social knowledge and memory. Her films and installations have screened at major festivals and museums—including Berlinale, Locarno, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa, MoMA, Tate Modern, and Serralves—and within dedicated programs at institutions and cinematheques across Europe and the Americas. Lamas’s practice is marked by formal restraint and conceptual clarity: structural constraints, iterative framings, and carefully delimited points of view become tools to probe migration, post-colonial histories, extractive capitalism, and the ethics of witnessing.
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
