Personale
Carmen Trocker’s Latest Documentary Explores the Luxury of Time and Humanity in the Hospitality Business.
The film, produced between Italy and Austria, premiered in 2024 and was showcased at Amsterdam's IDFA Festival this November. Trocker’s direction follows the staff of a four-star hotel in the Italian Dolomites, documenting their tasks, struggles, and fleeting moments of rest across their workday. The result is a close-up, behind-the-scenes look at the hidden labour sustaining the hospitality industry.
From the opening scene—where a pair of hands are busy aligning lounge chairs into perfectly straight rows—it is evident that our invitation to the Cavallino Bianco Hotel is not for pleasure. Our perspective is not that of a visitor but of a witness immersed in the staff’s reality, closely observing the labour required for the hotel machine to run smoothly, and silently, while the guests sip their cocktails. Two distinct realities, labour and leisure, cohabit in the elegant space like in a dance where the performers move to opposite beats. The tempo holds the borders between the two distinct realities, dictating which side of the coin is guaranteed the luxury of time and which must relentlessly chase it.
The camera offers an honest portrayal of a few working days in a deluxe family hotel of the South Tyrolean mountains. Its focus is the housekeeping staff—a transnational group primarily composed of immigrant workers from Ukraine, Mali, Libya, and Romania. Predominantly women, save for two exceptions, their ages range from young adulthood to middle age. This diverse team navigates an everyday battlefield made of vomit stains, shrunk cashmere garments, rags, hairs, bleach and complaints. The challenge is maintaining everything tidy and spotless while understaffed and underpaid, all according to an impossibly tight schedule.
What stands out is the managers' implicit yet imperative expectation that all of this labour be carried out invisibly—workers must be unseen, unheard, and yes, odourless. As we follow the staff through their gruelling daily routines, exhaustion slowly permeates our eyes and tightens our muscles. The camera never leaves the cleaners and their backbreaking labour, who fill the screen demanding our full attention: for ninety three minutes our gaze is not allowed to shift and we are forced to confront the discomfort we conveniently elude in everyday life.
Offering a factual report from the hotel's underbelly, Personale’s observational approach flips our typical perspective of the resort environment, portraying a suffocating and precarious workplace, rather than the sophisticated retreat we expect.
From the Tuschinski Theatre in the centre of Amsterdam, the cushy seats and lavishly decorated ceiling only enhance the sense of dissonance provoked by the documentary. The viewing experience is a moment of designed uneasiness, and while certainly entertaining, the narration is not crafted to amuse us. The restless action takes place in oppressively tight and windowless spaces, drawing us in a claustrophobic mix, simultaneously monotonous and overwhelming. Only once is the audience allowed a glimpse of the hotel’s famed panoramic views, emphasizing how inaccessible such moments of beauty are to the janitors. Instead, the lens focuses on the relentless scrubbing, folding, rubbing, polishing, and all the gestures performed by the staff in a tedious cycle.
One particularly striking scene shows a female worker cleaning a shower. In the hotel’s system, toilets are designated as “women’s work”—a rule the manager mentions without further explanation. The cleaner's gestures are quick and precise, a continuous flow of action that almost feels like an automatism. The mastery in her movements reveals the countless times she must have performed that same ritual, as well as her ever-present concern for the pressing lack of time.
The staff bodies, endlessly scrubbing and folding, are portrayed as instruments of labour. Their every movement is scrutinized and regulated by managers to maximize efficiency, a hyper-utilitarian micro-management that starkly negates individual expression and autonomy. In light of Agamben’s theory on gesture, which he conceptualises as potentiality beyond mere productivity (Agamben, 1996), Personale portrays the tension between the workers’ gestures as latent expressions of humanity and their reduction to purely functional actions. Moments of laughter or camaraderie are suppressed, as every action is subordinated to the labour's demands, reducing each employee to their immediate functions and stripping them of any expressive freedom. Through the cracks of this strict supervision, the cleaning staff manages to carve out moments to share their thoughts and experiences, exploring new ways of connecting across different cultures, generations, and languages. The film highlights many instances of miscommunication, which at times lead to frustration but also, occasionally, to brief and lighthearted moments of laughter.
Between the footage of the worker’s hectic activities, traces of the guests emerge, disrupting the flow. Static shots, rarely exceeding a minute, linger on details like a used coffee cup, an empty cigarette pack abandoned on a silver tray, scattered food and paper waste. The implication is clear: it is the guests' turn to be invisible, reversing the usual narrative that relegates the staff to the background. This deliberate subversion is reinforced through the film's visual language and audio design. Nora Czamler’s soundscape amplifies the tactile details of labour—the swipe of a chair, the flutter of sheets, the swish of detergent, and the abrasive scratch of a brush. In stark contrast, the chatter of the guests is rendered faint, a murmur overpowered by the roar of industrial washing machines in the hotel’s basement. This interplay of sound and imagery underscores the unusual hierarchy, inducing the focus on the staff and the instruments of their toil. This subversion in visibility provokes a subtle but palpable sense of disorientation, prompting us to question why things operate the way they do in real life and why the marginalization of workers is so easily overlooked. Why do we watch the screen with unease? What is the source of the bitter aftertaste that lingers as we leave the projection room? Surely the unsustainable pace of the cleaners’ routines and their evident understaffing confront us with the systemic inequality embedded in their labour. Their position as women and migrants reflects how intersecting capitalist power dynamics—gender, social status, race, and national origin—place transnational workers in the lowest segments of the work market. Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) discuss this phenomenon through the concept of multiplication of labour and highlight how exclusionary mechanisms, such as the delineation of borders, systematically restrict access to certain types of work and enforce invisibility. These divides, both literal and figurative, function to relegate specific groups to undervalued roles, denying them upward mobility and reinforcing structural inequalities.
Beyond questions of who has access to certain positions, the documentary raises the issue of who can afford what is perhaps the greatest luxury in today’s society: time. The final scene presents us with a sour answer. After rushing to clean all the rooms left behind by guests, two housekeepers wait quietly for a client who has not yet vacated her room. We never see the woman, but we hear her apologizing for the delay, promising to free the suite soon. From the corridor, one of the cleaners, also a woman, gently reassures her: “Sure, with calm, there is no rush.” This bitterly paradoxical conclusion highlights how time—its possession and indulgence—becomes the rare privilege that marks the separation between guests and janitorial staff. These reflections lead us to a third question: what is the deeper, insidious reason for the claustrophobia that pervades Personale? Throughout the documentary, the unreasonable workload and cramped spaces induce a palpable sense of anguish. However, the true feeling of confinement is triggered by the pressing surveillance the cleaning staff is subjected to. Various scenes see the workers being interrupted in their strenuous, often unappealing tasks, by managers who lecture them. They talk too much in the corridors while cleaning, their laughter is deemed inappropriate, and their sweat is too noticeable. In one particularly telling scene, the cleaners are instructed to wear their coats over their uniforms when outside, lest they be seen by guests in an “unprofessional” state. The discomfort this scene evokes reflects a larger dynamic and raises questions about what is acceptable to be seen and heard and what must remain hidden. Some form of shame drives the manager's request, but who does it affect? If the janitors are seen while resting in their—professional—uniform, who do they make uncomfortable and why? The occasional laughter, the smell and the cigarette break are not only inevitable but necessary aspects of how these people go through their daily work and experience. Why are those signs of humanity disturbing for some? It might be that we wish to believe luxury exists in a vacuum where no one has to toil to make it real. We prefer to bask in a fantasy where everything we desire magically appears, untouched and effortless, without recognizing the hardship behind it. The contrast between our vanity—the pleasure of finding perfectly folded toilet paper or swan-shaped linens—and the human labour of providing these small comforts becomes painfully tangible. These seemingly insignificant indulgences stand in stark opposition to the exploitation necessary to fulfil them, making our whims feel trivial and absurd.
A thin but firm wall stands between guests and staff, and the rare traces of individuality breaching this border serve as unwelcome reminders of the realities to which we contribute from our positions of privilege. The personale (“staff” in Italian) is not a faceless, nameless mass but a group of specific human beings with particular identities and personal stories, working under precarious conditions to make our leisure possible. As guests, we may not directly organise the exploitation of these workers, yet by enjoying the benefits of a system that thrives on their labour, we remain complicit. The deliberate invisibility imposed on housekeeping staff, whose efforts are expected to be flawless, unnoticed, and impersonal, perpetuates their marginalization. By erasing their presence and humanity, we undermine the value of their contributions to our comfort. This systemic invisibilization aligns with Michael Rothberg’s concept of implicated subjects, highlighting how individuals, even without direct involvement, become entangled in structures of oppression through the benefits they derive or the positions they occupy within such systems (Rothberg, 2019). In the case of hospitality work, this complicity is reinforced by a tendency to dissociate ourselves from the truth of how our amusement is maintained, allowing us to sustain the illusion that these dynamics are not our concern. Such willful ignorance is what makes pieces like Personale necessary more than ever, demanding that we see, with clear eyes, the discomfort that underpins our comfort. While the film does not directly address issues of fair wages or labour rights, it pushes us to acknowledge the first step toward a more just system, though far from realization.
Personale shines a light on the harsh distinctions between the groups who have access to certain spheres and the ones who can only experience them through toil. Trocker exposes the intersection of gender, migration, and labour rights, creating space and focus for the individuals ensuring that our luxury is possible, and questioning our roles in sustaining given dynamics. Whose humanity are we willing to see, and whose we prefer to ignore? We are left with a powerful as well as uncomfortable reflection on the nature of privilege, labour, and the systemic inequalities that shape the society we live in. What is the true cost of our leisure and what are we willing to overlook in order to maintain it?
A documentary by
Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.