2020, Cesenatico, Italy. Leli lives on the top floor of the Eritrea with her son and her father. In front of her, the sea as far as the eye can see.
She was born and raised in that Hotel, worked there for many years like her mother and her grandmother before her.
Every object in that place, just like the home movies and photographs emerging from her family archive, is a piece of a living mosaic surrounding her.
She was born and raised in that Hotel, worked there for many years like her mother and her grandmother before her.
Every object in that place, just like the home movies and photographs emerging from her family archive, is a piece of a living mosaic surrounding her.
In 1905, the socialist entrepreneur Aurelio Caimmi, grand-grand father of Leli, went to a trade fair where a pavilion displayed agricultural products from Eritrea, a country that was an Italian colony at the time.
He liked the pavilion and, when the exhibition was over, he had it dismantled and transported it to the beach, where he had purchased a piece of land. He made a restaurant out of it, which soon became a Hotel.
In this way, Hotel Eritrea was the first building to internally “colonize” that part of the Italian coast at the very dawn of maritime turism. The name of the Hotel remains as a clear trace of another colonialism, that of Italy in the Horn of Africa. As such, that history is at the same time present and forgotten in the Hotel’s memory. For Leli and her family, “Eritrea” is how they call their beloved and endangered home.
Throuout a century, coming across two world wars, having being demolished and rebuilt in the '50, the Hotel partecipated as a protagonist to the urban, social and cultural transformations of the Italian Riviera until today.
In the summer of 2020, due to the pandemic and for the first time in its history, the Hotel remained closed. For Leli and the other characters in the movie, this circumstance becomes an opportunity to remember, to narrate and to show their world.
Gastronomy secrets, ballrooms, beach games and summer loves return through the faces of today's and yesterday's generations, following the circularity of the seasons and the winds of the Riviera.
The Hotel becomes a prism through which layers of time, experience and memory merge, coexist and transform in mutual reflection. The movie aims to portray the intimate architecture created by these reflections.
In the space of Hotel Eritrea, every voice resonates with a family history, with a home that is also an enterprise, and with the rythmic sound of the sea. Past, present and future sometimes converge here, where every object speaks and the wind can change its direction at any time.