On Hospitality – Layla Al Attar and Hotel Al-Raheed is a necromantic documentary where the Iraqi artist Layla Al-Attar returns from the dead to tell the story of how a Swedish company built a luxurious hotel in Baghdad, ordered by Saddam Hussein for the 1983 summit of the Non-Alignment Movement. War changed the plans. Layla made a mosaic at the entrance of the hotel, depicting George Bush’s face, and her house was hit by an American missile.

In this work, an experiment is carried out that could be called necromancy: a dead person is made to speak to us alive about the past. Necromancy is always an integral part of historiography: using the imagination based on source studies, speculating about the context of history. We meet Layla Al-Attar, an Iraqi artist who talks about a special hotel in Baghdad and the concept of hospitality. Hotel Al-Rasheed was built by order of Saddam Hussein to house the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Baghdad in 1982. The construction of the hotel was a gigantic Swedish industrial project, today forgotten. It was led by SKANSKA company in Kalmar and more than 1000 companies contributed, many of them small businesses from the province of Småland. But the meeting in Bagdad never took place, the war with Iran broke out.
During the Gulf War, Hotel Al-Rasheed became the scene of the world's first televised war. Layla Al-Attar provided the entrance with a mosaic image depicting George Bush's face, as well as the text "Bush is criminal". A US missile hit her home in 1993, killing her, along with her husband and housekeeper.

On Hospitality was the winner at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival

1st Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia

Statement of the jury:
"This film, which we chose first after much deliberation, builds a multi-layered architecture out of the possibilities and impossibilities of history. A voice from beyond and footsteps on the inlays of ideology take us into a narrative prism that allows us to understand the complexities of our present and the depths of power. The Hotel al Rashid with its 1001 rooms offers the filmmakers just enough space to show us how to think, explore and feel cinematically."

On Hospitality was commissioned for the exhibition Round Here, curated by Christina Zetterlund, premiered at Designarkivet. It has been shown at Uppsala Kortfilmsfestival (International competition), Loods6; Amsterdam
Rencontres Paris/Berlin, Paris; Moderna Museet, curated by Filmform; Best of Short Film Festivals, Cologne; and
Movies on War, Elverum, Norway (International competition) during 2024.
It was nominated for a Guldbagge (Golden beetle) by Swedish Film Institute for best short film in Sweden 2024.