In a windy garden a man in his 80s is busy at the chopping block; two women – knitting socks – are keeping him company. A melange of live football broadcast and Opera seria is to be heard from the rooms. Sunday afternoon in Hotel Roccalba.

Is this a retirement home, a convalescence centre, or simply a hotel? The presence of the 12-person group in a building clearly in need of renovation leaves the question answered. A sportsman – with mobility problems and wearing bicycle shoes – is packing his equipment.

The petite groomed woman in a fur coat studies him as he tinkers on his racing bicycle. Uninterested in what’s going on another person is reading about the forest while lying down. Change of scene to a room. One hears at the same time a football broadcast on the radio and Simone Boccanegra singing from a record. An electric hair trimmer glides gently over an already thinning head of hair. Sitting on the bed, someone is slathering on makeup, the partner sleeping behind them takes no notice of course.

Down in the spacious bar. The waitress is reading a photo novel while simultaneously keeping an eye on a man in a white coat, who – with a large mocha in front of him – stares full of concentration in his reflection.

Hotel Roccalba keeps the levels of meaning hanging in the balance. It remains unclear what connects or distinguishes the 12 people in this film. Simply what they are doing, or indeed not doing, delegates the question of the deeper relevance to the viewer.

What's a festival without a major discovery? And what kind of a provincial New South-dwelling yokel would I be if that "discovery" weren't a major European artist that much of the larger world was already hip to long ago? Apparently over two years in the making (the artist displayed the script in a gallery exhibition in 2007, with suitably Structural / Conceptual directorial commentary), Hotel Roccalba is a small wonder, the sort of film that somehow manages to astonish with its precision while at the same time allow enough basic human breathing room to permit limitless discovery. Like the best formalist efforts -- Gerhard Richter paintings, Anton Webern compositions -- you can naturally learn Dabernig's film by heart because it does observe a kind of schematic organization. But it continues to unfold, with a warm, enveloping humor all the same. The basic set-up: Dabernig had his family act as non-professional performers in a not-quite-ten-minute film in the run-down titular inn in the Italian Alps. Roccalba begins with quick bursts of human industry: an older gentleman (Dabernig, Sr., I believe) chopping wood in the yard next to two middle-aged women in lawn chairs working on some very rapid knitting. Over on the sidewalk by the building, a younger man tinkers with his upturned bike. Inside the rooms of the hotel, there is a haircut, the application of make-up, and a very standoffish bartender / drinker interaction. But what makes Hotel Roccalba so remarkable is Dabernig's unerring sense of composition, editing and blocking. At first, we don't know what we're seeing, so we don't realize that these scenes are staged. When that's the case, Dabernig's ability to break a single scene into multiple fragments -- long, medium, and medium-CU shots, 90° and 45° angles, overhead shots -- all within seconds. (One of the few contemporary filmmakers I can think of who works in this manner is José Luis Guerín.) For example, Dabernig shows the haircut (a woman cutting a balding man's head from behind), and we see what looks like a mirror at a diagonal. It looks like a salon. The next shot is of a celebrity gossip magazine on an end table, its images divided into squares on the exact opposite diagonal as the mirror edge (which, it turns out, isn't.) The film is full of these gentle misdirections. There is a kind of flange-like X shape to the whole thing; Dabernig's formal flourishes become a little trickier as the goings-on move from industry to torpor. But this isn't exactly right. What really defines Hotel Roccalba is a bizarre, thrilling sense of the disorganized, random stuff of life being invisibly, imperceptibly choreographed, a God-like aspect that is gradually revealed, becoming a kind of Cubist hysteria. The final shot is an overhead of an older woman (Dabernig's mom, I think), wandering from person to person, asking what they're doing. The film's parting shot, then: active, almost aggressive non-productivity. (Did I mention this is a comedy?)

Enigmatic human poetry in motion spills forth from Josef Dabernig’s Hotel Roccalba (Austria), a sonata of inactivity starring the filmmaker’s family whose gestures of leisure conspire to operatic heights.

Josef Dabernig’s moving still life Hotel Roccalba (2008), which is as much a genuine family portrait as a wryly ironic meditation on holiday rituals.

... Überzeugend ist auch die neue Arbeit von Josef Dabernig, der in „Hotel Roccalba“ gewohnt unspektakulär eine spektakuläre Familiengeschichte in Schwarz-Weiß erzählt: scheinbar ritualisierte Alltagshandlungen in einem vermutlich italienischen Hotel, wohl komponiert, von Verdi begleitet und mit einem Al-dente-Humor versehen. ...