Press
UNAFF, 1999
‘White Hotel’
When two women with a video camera follow an American HIV research team to Eritrea, Africa, they are seduced by a land of joy and repression, of sensuality and sexual mutilation. White Hotel is the tourist residence where Griffin and Solvang begin their journey but their journalistic objectivity is shattered by the circumstances they encounter turning their documentary into an intimate investigation of their own capacities to love, suffer and forgive.
Slant Magazine, October 1, 2001
‘The White Hotel’
The journey that documentary filmmakers Dianne Griffin and Tobi Solvang make through a once war-torn Eritrea exposes how tradition, lack of education and financial instability is inextricably bound to Africa’s, AIDS crisis. In 1993, Griffin and Solvang arrived in Eritrea, unfamiliar with the country’s burgeoning freedom after 30 years of Ethiopian rule. While staying at the White Hotel, the women encounter resistance from uncooperative health officials. As a consequence, White Hotel becomes less a documentary on the African AIDS crisis than it does a “making of” treatise that blurs the lines of journalistic objectivity.
-Ed Gonzalez
Cue Magazine, February 1998
‘A Journey to the White Hotel’
It’s like the fiction of Paul Bowles only it’s not fiction at all, and Eritrea takes on a quality of being a landscape of the mind.
-Julia Terr
SF Gate.com, October 19, 1999
‘Documentaries in the Limelight / Famine human rights refugees among themes at Stanford Film Festival’
When the Midpeninsula Chapter of the United Nations Association and the Stanford Film Society staged a campus film festival made up of documentaries last year organizers were bowled over by audience response.
Featured documentaries include “White Hotel” Tobi Solvang and Dianne Griffin’s film about AIDS in East Africa.
-Peter Stack Chronicle Staff Writer
