IDFA 2024: Personale (dir. Carmen Trocker) | Review
Director Carmen Trocker invites us to take a closer look at the housekeeping team behind the perfection of a 4-star hotel in her documentary feature Personale.
“I’m invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” This quote from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man appears as the credits roll in Trocker’s film. It reflects how most people praise what is visible on the surface without acknowledging the hard work that takes place behind the scenes. In Personale (Italian for “Staff”), Carmen Trocker follows migrant workers from various countries—Mali, Libya, Ukraine, Romania—at a 4-star hotel in the Italian Dolomites. These workers serve the guests through endless cleaning to prevent complaints. Their existence is undeniable but very often strategically relegated to the margins of our minds as something vaguely nonexistent. Trocker therefore takes us inside a hotel, not to show its beauty, but to focus on the grueling, repetitive labor in the laundry room and the windowless corridors.
The documentary observes the daily routine of the workers: folding towels, straightening out sheets, taking bathrobes out of the dryer, stripping beds, cleaning up vomit, endless scrubbing—with a 93-minute runtime, Trocker fills her film with these monotonous tasks. Despite the hotel being located in a region renowned for its natural beauty, the film never shows the picturesque surroundings or the hotel’s design. Instead, Trocker’s camera stays focused on the workers and their tasks. Even in the guest rooms, we can only see sheets, pillows, and close-ups of the mattress.
There are always arguments among the workers, whether concerning the division of their tasks or the language they use at work (native Italians force migrants to speak Italian). However, I do not view this as a major issue for them. Rather, as the audience, we feel the exhaustion brought on by the pale color grading and the cramped, oppressive spaces of every frame. In doing so, Trocker reverses the typical perspective, making us experience the weight of labor alongside the workers, and that’s what makes the Italian director’s film particularly interesting.
Carmen Trocker produced Personale for Bagarrefilm, with Austria’s Ralph Wieser co-producing through Mischief Films. International sales are being handled by Vienna-based Filmdelights. Personale premiered in the Luminous strand at the 2024 International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.
