Guldbaggen nominee filmed at Konstfack
18 December 2024
The film "On Hospitality – Layla Al-Attar and Hotel Al-Rasheed" was filmed in Konstfack's studio and won a prize at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in May 2024. Since then it has been shown in Paris, Amsterdam, Cologne and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Now it has been nominated for a Guldbagge for the year's best short film.
Areej Almansory as Layla Al-Attar.
Directors are Magnus Bärtås, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for research, and Behzad Khosravi Noori, post doc, who are collaborating on a research project within the Microhistories research platform at Konstfack.
The film is about how Saddam Hussein commissioned Skanska in Kalmar to build a luxury hotel in Bagdad, a task that involved a number of small industries in Småland in the early 1980s. The hotel was ready in 1982 and was to house the annual meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, but an Iranian fighter aircraft crashed near the hotel and the meeting was moved to New Dehli in India.
In the film, a leading figure in Iraqi cultural life, the artist Layla Al-Attar (played by Areej Almansory), has risen from the dead to tell about the process and how she had a mosaic built outside the hotel entrance with the text "Bush is criminal".
The Guldbagge Gala will take place at Cirkus in Stockholm on 13 January 2025.