In the feature doc All-In, about life within a vast, all-inclusive hotel complex on the Turkish Riviera, Belgian filmmaker Volkan Üce sets his sights not on the tourists who turn up in their thousands to pack the water-slides and gorge themselves at the free buffet. Rather, it is the staff who are placed centre-stage, in particular the brooding philosopher Hakan and the shy, young Ismael. The film is selected for CPH:DOX Next:Wave competition.
We first meet our heroes at the beginning of the summer. The older Hakan, who is 25 and who wants to direct films, will be a lifeguard, while eighteen-year-old Ismael (who dreams one day of being a hairdresser) is bound for the kitchen where he will be responsible for soup.
At first, all is fine (and fun), but very soon Hakan becomes bored and despondent. He doesn’t think much of the boorish tourists, nor of the ‘invisible’ status he must maintain. When he broaches the subject of philosophy or literature with hotel guests, he is met with incomprehension. When he sees a kid getting knocked about by the waves, he lets the toddler’s mother carry him back to safety. What’s more he dreams of making a film about a house whose storeys represent the five stages of human development, from doubt to despair to nihilism. Right now he is firmly on level-3 three nihilism, he says, adding how he isn’t sure what he will find at the remaining levels.
Conversely, Ismael’s head is turned by all this Western excess. Wearing his chef’s hat he marvels at the fireworks and swimming pools teaming with soap bubbles, and takes clandestine (and kind of romantic) trips around the complex at night with a kitchen colleague. Whereas at the beginning of the film Ismael vows to send his money home to his family, he begins to spend more on his appearance, kitting himself out in a new wardrobe of clothes. He begins to think of the people in his home village as “naïve and slow.”
Just as the two hit it off together, the season draws to a close, leaving them to reflect on how much they have changed (as predicted by their understanding HR manager) and, crucially, whether or not they would ever envisage coming back the following year.
“For me they are like Michel Houellebecq characters,” says Üce, himself a huge fan of the not-so-enfant terrible of modern French literature, “who start with a passion, a dream, with the ideology, with hopes, with plans. And at the end of the book they still do the same stuff but they do it without the ideology, without the big drive. Their hopes and their dreams change, they do it more like a robot. They just do it because they should do it.”
All-In is also a film of contrasts, not least between the cultured staff and the overfed (and subsequently oversized) tourists. Hakan is brash (but likeable) while Ismael is gentle. Hakan is atheist (or at least agnostic) while his co-workers are devout Muslims. And of course, the all-in resort with its excess and garishness sits uneasily within a cultivated Turkey.
What’s more, the staff are expected to be invisible against the hotel backdrop. “That is what I wanted to emphasise, that in this hotel everything is made to make the staff anonymous and to give the tourists the feeling that they are like gods, that they are at the centre. So the staff have to wear the same T-shirt, they are not allowed to talk to the tourists, they have to just be part of the machine…they are depersonalised for the pleasure of the tourists, and what I do with this documentary is to change the narrative.”
“In my film I make the tourists more anonymous – and for the staff who are depersonalised, I personalise them. These are human beings and they are worth as much as you,” he underlines.
What’s more, his characters are eminently watchable, and that also includes Hakan’s fellow lifeguard Sakin (who admits to having thumped a tourist in the past) and HR man Alper, who implores the staff to take a picture at the beginning of the season to judge their own evolution by over the summer.
“I have this kind of bromance with Hakan,” Üce says of the film’s co-star with whom he stays in regular touch. “We can talk to one another for hours about one quote of Emil Cioran, the Romanian philosopher.”
“We all have different persona,” the director adds. “Me, myself I have Turkish roots, I was born and raised in Belgium and it’s so fucked up. Sometimes one persona so overwhelms another persona and everybody judges you [accordingly], and that is something Hakan struggles a lot with. He is much more than a lifeguard working for €200 a month, but just because of his job people look down on him. So that is one of the messages of the film and also one of my goals. And also why I can relate so well with Hakan.”
Sales of All-In are handled by Paris-based Cats and Docs.
