Hotel Coolgardieis to bogans whatJawsis to sharks.
The sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling documentary follows two young Finnish backpackers, Lina and Steph, as they weather a barrage of sexist and racist slurs while working for scraps in the eponymous Western Australian pub, colliding head on with the full force of ’Strayan philistinism in the process.
To say the pair’s stay in Australia was doomed from the start might be a little bit dramatic, but it’s fair to say their ‘trip of a lifetime’ began pretty shakily. “Australia was always on the top list of places to visit,” Lina explains. “But we finally made the decision to move to Australia after we got robbed … and our money was taken, so we really needed to work to save some money.”
Indeed, it was the friends’ dire financial straits that led them to the ramshackle hellhole of the title – a bar-cum-hovel that emerges as the film’s true villain. Hotel Coolgardie is every negative connotation of Australian culture transformed into a single, slanted building: a den of alcoholism and antagonism that blights Steph and Lina’s exploits from the outset. “If we had been in a better economic situation, we would have left the same day we arrived in Coolgardie,” says Lina simply.
“We were in need of money and had to suck it up and try to keep face so that we could keep our job,” she continues. “The situation between the employer and the employee in Coolgardie would never happen in our home country – which made it even harder to try to accept it and to be quiet, when you have grown up your whole life learning what is right and what is wrong.”
Describing what goes on in the hotel over the course of the documentary as ‘wrong’ might even be an understatement. The women face a horrendous torrent of sexist and racist remarks from the locals, as the drunks demonstrate their shaky understanding of geography and culture by assuming Lina and Steph’s Finnish background means they dine solely on reindeer.
Lina isn’t entirely sure what breeds such xenophobia. “Maybe they are showing off?” she guesses. “Or maybe they are scared of being hurt? Or [maybe] they don’t even know they’re being sexist – maybe they think that’s just the way things are?
“It felt like we were being objectified, rather than being valued for who we were outside of just being women. Every day we got [told] that we were stupid or dumb as a horse. Little did they know that I have a master’s degree in economics. Racism got a whole new meaning for me in Coolgardie. It was like people were making us the ‘the others’ so that they could feel like they were ‘normal’. Everyone feels good when they’re a part of a gang … and part of reinforcing that is identifying who is not in the gang, by picking differences such as race, gender or language.”
But despite such horrors, the pair’s time in Coolgardie wasn’t a total nightmare, and the documentary shines through with some genuinely tender, human moments, most of which are provided by a slightly odorous local legend who goes by the name of Canman. If Hotel Coolgardie has a hero, he is it – he’s the lone resident who comes to Lina and Steph’s defence.
Well, Canman and the documentary’s crew, a tight-knit group led by director Pete Gleeson. “The filmmaking team were very supportive and empathetic,” Lina says. “We lived under the same roof and they were filming us around the clock. We didn’t even notice after the first day or two that we had a film crew surrounding us all the time.”
However, despite how tough their time in Coolgardie might have been, in retrospect Lina can see the lighter side of it. “[It is] absurd almost to the point of comedy how downhill things go in the film,” she says. “It’s bad vibes, mixed with really bad luck, mixed with bad circumstances.”
Though she felt a wide array of emotions while watching the film for the first time, more than anything she found herself laughing – a response that audiences will no doubt share when the doco screens at Sydney Film Festival. “It was really emotional to see the film,” Lina says. “It was filmed a few years ago and I had already forgotten some of the things that happened. When I saw it, all those feelings came back … I really wanted to go back to Coolgardie, to meet all the people once again and talk to them now, when I don’t have to be scared of losing my job anymore.”
One can only imagine the kind of things Lina might find herself saying without fear of repercussion. However, it does seem like her time in Coolgardie has taught her some fairly hard-earned lessons about the human race – lessons that have imbued a strong sense of empathy in the young heroine.
“I hope that the movie is an eye-opener. I hope that people will understand they … affect other people,” she says. “It was difficult to be in a foreign country, with no money, no family and without any support system. The people we were supposed to rely on were the ones who treated us the worst.”
Hotel Coolgardie(dir. Pete Gleeson) shows at Event Cinemas George Street, Friday June 10, as part of Sydney Film Festival 2016.
