Hotel Pacific

The early 1930s. Young Roman Boryczko takes a job washing dishes in the kitchen of a hotel called the Pacyfik. The order downstairs is harsh: the waiters devour one another, the boys are beaten, everyone imitates the man above him. Roman learns that order and climbs the ladder fast. But the higher he goes, the more of himself he loses. Janusz Majewski's film is a Polish and Czechoslovak co-production. The source is Henryk Worcell's novel of 1936; the writer had worked as a waiter himself. Marek Kondrat and Roman Wilhelmi take the leads. The film screened in Berlin and is counted among the classics of Polish cinema. The telling uses the hotel kitchen as a model of a whole society.