Hotel Yugoslavia

2017, directed by Nicolas Wagnières

A journey through the times and spaces of the Hotel Jugoslavija. In this emotional documentary and political allegory, the film’s Swiss director Nicolas Wagnières, who spent his childhood summers in his mother’s native country of Yugoslavia, tells the sad history of Hotel Jugoslavija (Hotel Yugoslavia), the most luxurious hotel ever built in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade during the communist rule, which then suffered the same fate as the country that built it.

Through his nostalgic personal testimony, old movie and news clips and commercials, and new interviews with his mother and several people who ran it over the decades, the narrator-director commemorates both the hotel, his semi-idealistic view of Yugoslav socialism and the no-longer-existent country he loved as a child, but also warns of the pitfalls of capitalism and cronyism.