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Hotel E (1992)

Original title: Hotell E

Animation Duration 29:26

Mälestused

Priit Pärn

Then after the communism fell, you did Hotel E, which deals with East and West comparison. There’s a kind of bitterness in both of these worlds. Was it a big disappointment for you to see the new western culture coming to your old world?
Priit: No, I didn’t mean it like this. Breakfast was like goodbye for soviet times. After that I decided to quit filmmaking for a second time. I started with Hotel E only in 1991, after four years. In this period I traveled a lot around the festivals with Breakfast and then won a lot of prizes. If you win a grand prix, you automatically become a jury member next year, so I travelled again. Estonia is very close to Finland. I had some friends there; we had common business so I visited them very often. I spent two weeks somewhere, two weeks at home. And this was time of changes. In Estonia it happened so fast, that if you were two weeks away and came back, you had to catch some of your friends, sit down at the table and ask what happened meanwhile. You wouldn’t understand what’s going on without that. And there came this feeling … You are somewhere in Sweden or Germany, everything is so clean, so perfect and you think – OK, at home it’s neither so bad. But you come back and find dark, grey, dirty streets and your feeling is that – Oh, no. It was also a period of very strong criminality, like gangs fighting for territories and so on. I understood that the people are people, I knew, it wasn’t any paradise. But I’d never say that it was a kind of disappointment. Lot of critics tries to see this film in a political way. It’s not political film. It’s about person in the field of two systems. About the guy who is going out and coming back. Maybe until the certain point I was this guy.
Next step is how it’s done. How to make all these things to look like a real life? For example the motif of fly. It’s just a small idea not connected to the main theme. I was with my wife in Norway and there was a Norwegian girl with a fly in her eye… I remember from childhood, if you had something in your eye people used to take it out with a tongue. A finger is not soft enough. My wife took out the fly from Norwegian girl eye with her tong… I thought how I could use it because for me it was attractive. And there were lot of such things… To make a good film you need to have a skeleton, and then you’re covering it with small details. Without them you could have very strong story, but it could be boring.
One more thing to Hotel E: if somebody would say in 1992 that the film is actual still in 2010, I’d never believe. But people in France are still afraid of Polish plumbers. They’re coming from the East! Westerns are still afraid of Eastern Europeans.

Isn’t this the politics? You said your films are not political…
Priit: OK, Breakfast, it is. I was in a very tough position when doing it, I was against the system. There are four people; maybe all together they are one artist – there is masculine side, feminine side and bureaucratic side. The story is concretely located; its place is Soviet Union. But in Hotel E I was interested in the person. The one who moves from one room to another. This time I showed that a western world is so beautiful that it makes you sick. And grey stagnating world that is finally ending is in a way more exciting.

Maybe political is not the right expression. But it’s true that you’re touching the actual situation in the world in all of your films.
Priit: My films are connected to real life. Beginning with Triangle I tried to show that animation could be a serious thing. Not in meaning that you don’t laugh – I use humor, irony etc. – but in a sense that animation is not just for children, or is not any game. Animation can touch and can be about things that exist in reality. Of course, you can’t do this directly, than it’s heavy and boring.

Ivana Laučíková
HFJ Priit Pärn - Homo Felix, http://homofelixjournal.com/onlinefulltexts/priit-parn (06.06.2014).

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