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ni ada story sikit;
Once one of the most luxurious hotels in southern Africa, the Grande Hotel, in Beira, Mozambique, was abandoned by its original owners five decades ago.
It's now home to between 2,000 and 3,000 people who live in squalid conditions, without running water or electricity. Yet for these people the crumbling building is a self-contained community where they sleep, eat and work.
The once-luxurious lodging is the subject of a movie by Belgian filmmaker Lotte Stoops, which has just had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Stoops stayed near the Grande Hotel during a month-long trip to Mozambique six years ago and was fascinated by what she saw.
"It was like a village within a village," she said. "It looked like the perfect social housing project."
Stoops returned to Beira two years ago to begin making her first documentary-length film, titled "Grande Hotel."
Officially opened in 1955, when Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony, the Grande closed its doors as a working hotel in the mid 60s.
By 1992, when the country's 16-year civil war ended, the building was accommodating refugees from all over Mozambique.
There were originally 110 guest rooms, but Stoops says every bit of space in the building is now used as a living area.
"The telephone booths have been cut off and made into a room, the corridor is a room," said Stoops, who estimates there are currently about 350 families living there.
There is little inside the hotel to hint at its former splendor. Glass has been taken from its windows and sold, while wood from the interior has been used to build fires, said Stoops.
Farisai Gamariel is an English teacher in Beira, but at weekends he works as a tour guide, showing cruise ship passengers around the city. One of the stops on his tour is the Grande Hotel.
"Tourists come from England, Germany, Austria," he said. "They are quite curious to go and see what it's like.
"Some actually refuse, they think it's not a good place to go, they are scared. But it's not really scary, it's just like a community."
Like any community, it is organized. It is headed by a "secretary" whose job it is to resolve residents' problems, and some residents act as security, said Gamariel.
Some of the building's original squatters have claimed rooms as their own and now act as landlords, letting them to others.
*dah mcm citer penjara kat La Paz tu lak..
credit to: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02- ... sengers?_s=PM:WORLD |
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