Hotel Babylon Practice Extract

Hotel Babylon Practice Extract David Chikezie



I thought the theme of this Extract was Ethnicity Representation and how minorities are looked are different in business and work, the extract shows immigrants working at a English hotel the way the minority actors are forced to hide as someone looks for them with an immigration service shows the color representation problems in society today. In the clip we see men walk into a hotel with suits talking to a lady with a suit, all dressed well with high roles in the hotel, we can assume she is the manager or front desk.

In the first scenes we see some close ups on the manager of the hotel, these were added to show the emotion in the lady’s face, we also see close up on the immigration officers face, these close up were used to intimidate the audience and hint that something intense could be coming up, there was also many over the shoulders shots over the shoulder of the manager to show her point of view and give the viewers a frame of who the character is talking to. The Officer quickly and angrily takes his ID out to get access to the premises, the director showcase Ethnicity representation by showing the scenes where they all panickily run into the storage room, their panic and close up of their faces capture their true emotions and show how important it is for them to no get caught, We are shown how important it is for them to hide because the extreme close up to the lock of closet door. When Jackie, a Chinese Native that also works for the English hotel gathers all the immigrants to the storage room, she counts the people present, she then says, “Ibrahim is missing”. This is shown by the quick zoom out of her face, which allows the audience to see her panic

To continue, another example of ethnicity being misrepresented is when the worker faints we then see a quick zoom out of Jackie. Jackie’s face shows her panic because she does not know what to do, we then see a close to a man who immediately steps into action, He tells the crowd that this woman is diabetic and very quickly solves the problem by putting sweet jam on her gums, this shows that the immigrants are very intelligent and have past jobs, we get a zoom to the woman regaining consciousness, the man that saved her followed with dialogue saying “ I was not always a cleaner” this dialogue advances the theme because It shows that the immigrants are falsely mistreated and misrepresented, the way the immigrant officer looks at he thinks that immigrants steal jobs and commit crime, but this scene shows how useful they can be and how they care for others.

Although, the most significant representation of ethnicity happens in the beginning when a man in a suit is asked by the front desk lady to “take the purple advocate slips downstairs” we later learn this has a alternate meaning of hide the immigrants, the officer are here. This tells the viewer this could happen more often then we originally think, . Dramatic, non-diegetic music plays in the background, allowing Tensions to build and make the scene intense. One significant difference we see between the officers and the hotel workers they are looking for is their outfits. We see as the immigration officer only hut down people with less well-dressed outfits. They instantly take it Ibrahim because of his nature and the clothes he was wearing, the assumed as if he didn’t belong. This develops the theme by showing people are quick to judge by what they hear or what they are told instead of trusting their own judgement.

Furthermore, to advance the them we then hear non-diegetic, slow, sad music as we see Jackie remove Ibrahim’s possessions from his locker. We are shown a side on medium close up of her getting emotional from looking at his possession the editing and the clamps make us really see how much see takes keeping these immigrants safe. Later, we see a cafeteria area, where we see different races of people gather together at different tables, we also hear ambient sound of dialogue in different language which shows the diversity in the actors. We can see although a member has gone missing they are continuing normal living this shows me that things like this could happen regularly and they are used to losing people to immigration officers. The clip end in silence with a fade out, to show the missing of Ibrahim on the last table.

To sum it all up, Hotel Babylon shows a lot of different representations of ethnicity, by showing immigration officers fighting to keep their jobs by arresting innocent people, or desperate immigrants running to save their lives. Living a minimum wage job. This theme shows how a group of people could be discredited and mistreated.