Maéva Ranaïvojaona & Georg Tiller
HOTEL DES THERMES
A costume ball in a grand hotel in Madagascar turns into a bloodbath when the ghosts of the colonial past awaken.
Madagascar, today. After the death of her daughter, Lalasoa returns to the Hôtel des Thermes, a relic of French colonisation, as a chambermaid. As Westerners gather to negotiate agricultural exploitation projects, Lalasoa is haunted by grief and by the apparition of a little girl wandering the hotel corridors. Around her, worlds intersect and collide. Raymond, a French-Senegalese agronomist engineer, hopes to impose his robotic machines in the surrounding rice fields, at the cost of a compromise with Mr. Barnet, heir to a colonial lineage that openly embraces the violence of the past. Meanwhile, his partner David grows closer to Lalasoa and discovers the textile know-how of her village, bearers of another form of modernity. When the hotel is placed under quarantine, the boundaries between the living and the dead collapse. The revenants of Malagasy employees who rose up in the 1950s emerge for post-colonial vengeance, re-enacting the violence of history in order to overturn it.
DIRECTORS
Maéva Ranaïvojaona & Georg Tiller
PRODUCERS
Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu, Bady Minck
PRODUCTION COMPANY
AMOUR FOU Vienna
CO-PRODUCTION COMPANY
De L’Autre Côté du Périph’
COUNTRIES
Austria, France
Maéva Ranaïvojaona
DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Maéva Ranaïvojaona is a French-Malagasy writer, director, and producer living and working in Paris and Vienna. Her films have been selected for and won awards at international film festivals such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Short Film Corner at the Festival de Cannes, FIDMarseille and the Vienna International Film Festival. In 2016, she received the Air France FIDLab Award as a producer. In 2017, she opened the French office of the production company Subobscura Films in Paris, together with Austrian producer and director Georg Tiller. Completed productions include Tiller’s Overnight Flies (2016), winner of the awards for Best Feature Film and Best Director at the Cameroon International Film Festival, and Hilal Baydarov’s When the Persimmons Grew (2019), which won both the Jury Prize and the Interfaith Award at Visions du Réell in Nyon and the Heart of Sarajevo for Best International Documentary at the Sarajevo Film Festival. In 2020, Zaho Zay, a creative documentary co-produced and co-directed by Ranaïvojaona and Tiller, won two awards at FIDMarseille and the MehrWert-Prize at the Viennale.
Hôtel des Thermes is a “colonial revenge” story about the enduring legacy of colonialism in Madagascar. We – Maéva Ranaivojaona, a descendant of Malagasy immigrants in France, and Viennese filmmaker Georg Tiller – found our inspiration in the Hôtel des Thermes in Antsirabé, which has endured as a symbol of colonial power. In the film, it becomes an eerie place where guests strike deals over the future of Madagascar’s rice agriculture. At the same time, Malagasy ancestral spirits confront their descendants with the violent colonial past, blurring the boundaries between reality and the supernatural, past and present. Drawing on Malagasy spirituality and historical events, Hôtel des Thermes shows how the hotel’s dark legacy shapes its inhabitants, reawakens memories of past violence, and negotiates the ongoing exploitation of the land. With its diverse ensemble, the film reflects both facets of colonialism and contemporary Malagasy society.
DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
Georg Tiller
DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Georg Tiller is an Austrian producer and director. His completed productions include Overnight Flies (2016, 97 min), which he directed and which received the Best Feature Film and Best Director awards at the Cameroon International Film Festival; When the Persimmons Grew (2019, 119 min), directed by Hilal Baydarov, which won both the Jury Prize and the Interreligious Award at Visions du Réel in Nyon, as well as the Heart of Sarajevo Award for Best International Documentary at the Sarajevo Film Festival; and Zaho Zay (2020), a creative documentary co-directed and co-produced by Maéva Ranaïvojaona and Georg Tiller, which received two awards at FIDMarseille and the MehrWERT Award at the Viennale.
Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu
PRODUCER’S BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1971, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu studied philosophy and film theory in Vienna. In 1989, he started working as an independent film critic for Austria’s Public Radio ORF. He subsequently worked as a distributor for Polyfilm Verleih (Vienna), as a film programmer and curator. In 1995, together with Bady Minck, he co-founded the production company Amour Fou Luxembourg, and in 2001, Amour Fou Vienna. In 2003, Amour Fou had its international breakthrough when four of its films were invited to the Festival de Cannes: Ruth Mader’s Struggle, Alain Guiradie’s No Rest for the Brave, Bady Minck’s In the Beginning Was the Eye, and Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film. He has produced more than seventy works, including0 fiction features, documentaries, and short and animated films, among them György Palfi’s Taxidermia, Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, Jessica Hausner’s Amour fou, Dieter Berner’s Egon Schiele, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx, and Evi Romen’s Why Not You“ by. Dumreicher-Ivanceanu is a member of the European Film Academy, the Austrian Film Academy, and the Luxembourg Film Academy. He is the Chairman of the Association of the Film & Music Industry at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.
PRODUCER’S STATEMENT
Hôtel des Thermes follows Black entrepreneur Raymond and his partner David, a white fashion designer, to Madagascar, where Raymond seeks to close a lucrative business deal rooted in colonial continuities, while David searches for “authentic” inspiration. They stay at the timeless Hôtel des Thermes, a relic of colonial elegance. Spectral figures from the 1950s haunt the hotel as a plague begins to spread, becoming a metaphor for colonial violence and the ongoing exploitation of land and labour in the Global South. Blending mystery, horror, and art-house cinema, the film reflects on colonial legacies through a striking aesthetic and a diverse ensemble. In development since 2021, the project emphasises transcultural collaboration, diversity, and ethical filmmaking, in close cooperation with the Malagasy film and cultural community. Conceived as an Austrian-French co-production, Hôtel des Thermes aims to reach both broad and cinephile audiences with a poetic, political genre film.
Production company profile
Founded in Luxembourg in 1995, in Vienna in 2001, and in Germany in 2023, Amour Fou realises artistically exceptional fiction, documentary, and short films. Throughout the process, Amour Fou stands for vision and pushing the envelope, whether in regard to aesthetics, production, or distribution strategies. Its focus is on European independent auteur cinema and the distinctive “handwriting” of the directors who work with Amour Fou. The associate partners of Amour Fou Vienna and Amour Fou Luxembourg are Bady Minck, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu, and André Fetzer of Amour Fou Germany.
Where are we at?
TOTAL ESTIMATED BUDGET
3.865.972 €
FINANCES PENDING
3.635.972 €
FINANCING IN PLACE
230.000 €
Production timeline
Summer 2026
Financing/Pre-production
2027
Start of shooting