At a distance of almost two years from the première of the show Splendid’s, and after an Italian and European tour that took in more than a hundred different hotels, the company’s desire to make a medium-length film was realised through production collaboration from TTV and the extraordinary chance to have complete access to the Grand Hotel in Riccione, closed for the off season.

This slightly decadent luxury setting with its period furniture is absolutely unique among Adriatic Riviera hotels, which are now standardised to a single architectural model. And it is faithful to the collective imagination ofSplendid’s.

Motus’s plan was to avoid detracting too much from the theatre nature of the piece by working on a sequence of long takes with the dolly and slow tracking shots in the somewhat rundown corridors, also “following” the actors with the shoulder-held camera, up and down the stairs and into the various bedrooms, moving among them with the Canon and trying to give the camera a slow and continuous movement, as if it too were taken by the same irrepressible need to dance, to challenge death, that every image carries lightly within itself.