The Grasslands Project - Val Marie Hotel
2016 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Scott Parker
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Aline Laturnus works from seven-a.m. breakfasts to two-a.m. bar closings to keep the Val Marie Hotel open. Residents explain why the hotel is the community's hub and what its loss would mean.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to eulogize small-town institutions, but Parker resists the sentimentality trap—this is a portrait of exhaustion and necessity, not nostalgia, which is braver and weirder than the premise suggests.
A formally restrained documentary that trusts the accumulated weight of testimony and routine detail; the structure unfolds with the discipline of a classical essay film, letting the Val Marie Hotel's significance emerge through carefully composed observation rather than editorial assertion.
The decision to keep Aline herself mostly off-screen—present only through her labor and the architecture of her daily routine—transforms what could be a simple portrait into something about invisible scaffolding that holds communities together.