Stanford Teaching Guide – White Hotel – 2012
FLM 16- Camera As Witness: Women Around the World From Victims to Leaders -This course offers a unique chance to become familiar with global women’s issues, understand the aesthetic capacities of documentary filmmaking.
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
Tuesday, April 24, 2012An examination of the tragedy of AIDS in Africa as experienced in Eritrea, a small, poor republic which has been devastated by the disease. The culprits are easily identified–inefficient health care facilities and funding, lack of awareness education, traditional female circumcision rituals which leave young women highly susceptible to infection–and the victims face a long and painful death sentence due to an unfocused and underfinanced effort to offer the barest basics of quality treatment. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/439386/White-Hotel/overview
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Panel for Stanford University – DREAM ACT
Wednesday October 24 at 7:15 pm
San Francisco, Variety Theatre, 582 Market Street
Panelists: Nadia Arid, Legal Assistant for Legal Services for Children
Dianne Griffin, Filmmaker, Sara Masetti, Director/Producer, Undocumented Dreams
Theo Rigby, Director, Sin País
