DE, IT 1993 | Director, Script: Carmen Tartarotti | Camera: Pio Corradi | Editor: Ferdinand Ludwig, Carmen Tartarotti | Sound: Kurt Eggmann, Michael Busch | Music: Werner Pirchner | Colour | 16mm | 70 min | german/italian OV with german SUB

Paradise is a place at the back of the Martell Valley, where, in the 1930s, urban civilisation permitted a futuristic hotel to be built based on a plan by famed Italian architect Gio Ponti. This hotel has been in ruins for more than 20 years. "Paradise" is a metaphor for a charming landscape, an untouched place: this spot was chosen by rich, influential city dwellers as a place to erect a hotel with all the modern comforts for their recreational needs. The flip side of the paradise metaphor is temptation and sin. Farmers from this Alpine valley only had access to the futuristic building as construction workers, and later as suppliers of food. Hotel Paradiso is also indirectly a film about the workings of capitalism. The idealistic, progressive thinking of the 1930s was followed by the focus on profit in the 1950s and the speculative thinking of the 1960s and 1970s; alienation is increasingly in evidence. (Carmen Tartarotti, 1993)