Empire Hotel

Empire Hotel
Portugal, Macao, Mainland China, Lebanon | 2018 | 82’ | DCP | Colour |
Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Portuguese | Group: C

Director: Ivo M. Ferreira

An introduction of the film will be given by film delegation before the film screening

Maria’s home has always been the Empire Hotel, in a traditional neighborhood of Macao where clothes hang between neon lights, and an entangled net of electric wires takes over the streets. With her aging father living there, the burden of keeping the decrepit hotel running stands on her shoulders. She sings Fado in a Casino where gambling and prostitution go hand in hand, but money is scarce and real estate speculators become insistent. That is when Chu arrives, a mysterious young man with an obsessive interest in Maria.

Ivo M. Ferreira was born in Lisbon in 1975. He developed a taste for cinema at an early age, and after finishing high school with a photography and audiovisual communications diploma, he enrolled in the London Film School and University Of Budapest. He made his first documentary in Macao while traveling in Asia, and then he directed a series of anthropological documentaries in Angola, Africa. His subsequent feature films are Em Volta (2002), April Showers (2009) and Letters From War (2016) which premiered in competition in Berlin. Empire Hotel is his fourth feature. He lives in Macao.