Sophie Koko Gate’s short film Hotel Kalura explores the malleability of desire

Sophie Koko Gate’s wickedly odd and ever-so-alluring film, Hotel Kalura, was made in a wardrobe. During lockdown, with funding from a previous award she’d won for the film Slug Life, the London-based artist and animator worked with a small remote team of creative collaborators to bring the short to life. “Skillbard, my long-time collaborators, made the beautiful sound on a very tight deadline,” Sophie says, naming the crew behind Hotel Kalura, including Anne-Lou Erambert, Rosie Gate, Eric Larson, Peter Chownsmith and Adam Brandrowski. Before long, the film had been nominated for a 2023 Jarman Award, screened worldwide and broadcast on Hulu in the States. Now, Hotel Kalura is online, and your eyes will thank you for it. 

“The theme is longing and desire through the lens of surrealism,” Sophie says, speaking to the concepts behind the film – the narrative of which seems to wander and flow like the characters it sports. “I’m interested in the human brain’s ability to fantasise to the point where it disrupts reality,” she adds. In line with this thinking, the film explores both the seemingly mythological, seductive side of fantasy and its nervous, disquieting sensibilities. “I think there is a lot of anxiety around the malleability of desire,” Sophie continues.

The film dances around multiple enticing scenes, with numerous tableaus inhabiting a world that – albeit usual and at times unsettling – feels somewhat real. “My best friend and I had gone to Sicily to one of those cheap hotels where you just stay in and around the hotel the whole time,” Sophie recalls. In that hotel, she and her friend met an older woman with red hair, sitting alone at a bar with a face mask and a martini. “I projected an entire life onto her and found myself imagining what it was like to holiday alone after a divorce,” she says. “What did she long to have happen to her sitting alone at the bar every night?”

Curiosity is a key theme across Hotel Kalura. The film offers more questions than answers, which makes the Werner Herzog-esque opening narration incredibly appropriate. Everything in the film is knocked slightly off-kilter – with everyday things being ever so slightly amended to be something slightly unsettling, from fat cigarettes and slow reactions to buttons that press too deeply.

There’s also a great satisfaction and beauty to the unapologetic oddity of the film, with fantastically weird characters, like Crab Man, an instrumental gentleman with an unusually shaped head. “Crab Man was inspired by a chess master I was dating at the time,” Sophie says. “He tried to show me the moon through a giant telescope one night, but he wouldn’t let me have a proper look in the end. The Moon was too beautiful I guess.” These figures, Lynchian in their appearance and dialogue, have an earnestness that only comes from their real-world influences. “He was quite nervous and had an A4 inkjet print out of a supernova in his bedroom as if it were a memory,” Sophie adds. “I just remember thinking this guy is like... homesick or something. He’s not from this world.”

Hotel Kalura marks the end of an era for Sophie, specifically in this dimension. “I knew this would be my final 2D film, so I made it as a swan song to 2D animation” – she pushed her glossy airbrush aesthetic to its absolute maximum. “I’m done now, and I've started to become my character in real life.” Now, Sophie is making 3D animated films using motion capture suits while training to be a clown. “I love it, I can finally move around in my worlds,” she says. She’s finally found her own “soft voice” in a medium she’s super excited by: “You can be spontaneous and autonomous in 3D which is what I was missing in 2D,” Sophie ends. “I’m free!”