Splendid Hotel

Tadjoura, the red sea, 1886. More than ten years after abandoning poetry, Arthur Rimbaud, now a merchant in Africa, considers returning to France. He only needs one last score: exchange thousands of rifles with King Menelik. But nothing goes as planned.

The cursed poet is now an arms dealer in the Horn of Africa. There he tries to set up a caravan and sell thousands of rifles to the king of Abyssinia. He dreams of earning enough money to return to France and finally live in peace. But destiny has other plans for him and a very different ending. As the wait seems endless, Rimbaud becomes another person, reaching the point of no return.

The days go by, the heat is unbearable and suffocating, the sunlight is omnipresent. 'Splendid Hotel' is a poetic act, the story of a disappearance and the beginning of a myth. "The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist. There is never a center. There is no path or line. Only vast spaces where there should be someone, but that's not the case, there was no one," says Damien Bonnard's voice-over as we see the image of a desert landscape at the beginning of Pedro Aguilera's new film, written with Nathan Fischer and Bonnard himself, and which after its world premiere in La Roche-sur-Yon was screened at the Seville Festival.