When History Meets Heartbreak: The Unfolding Tragedy of Hotel Coppelia (2021)
When Hotel Coppelia first started gaining attention on the film festival circuit in 2020, it seemed to promise something bold and exciting—a story that did not only want to remember history, but to feel it, to let the spectators sense the fear, the passion, and the desperation of a revolution. The excitement was palpable: a period piece set during the 1965 Dominican Civil War, but not focusing on the soldiers or the politicians, and instead telling the story through the women trapped in a brothel. It was director José María Cabral’s first film in his career to be publicly described as a film about resistance. He said it would feature the kind of resistance women routinely endure: the kind that exists in silence, in the shadows, and with the women’s bodies and choices.
Before the film was released, the atmosphere of the film was palpable through the trailers: candlelight, broken smiles, and soldiers’ boots stomping through dark corridors and hallways. It was clear that Hotel Coppelia was not going to be a typical war film. It felt more as though it was a confession: a story that was waiting to be told, and perhaps, was painful to remember.
A Revolution Seen Through Women’s Eyes
It is 1965 in Santo Domingo during the U.S. intervention. The Dominican Republic is engulfed with two governments, and the U.S. intervenes with their military. The Coppelia is a coastal brothel where the short story takes place. Coppelia is a place where men procure and women for survival. The characters, and Gloria (Lumi Lizardo), and Mariela (Nashla Bogaert), and the younger girls exploitaged and survive with resilience.
The civil war reaches Coppelia and Gloria’s girls find themselves in the crossfire. The girls must decide between the rebels who promise freedom and the soldiers who demand obedience. Gloria, the Coppelia’s matron, attempts to draw the lines, stating, the war does not belong to us. The rest is silence.
The film promises not to simplify. Violent scenes and defending war in the story is unthinkable. The war consumes everything; love, and characters lose their morals and identities. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie, vivid and unambiguous, shows the rush of liberation. The men they had aided once betrayed them, and their bodies battlegrounds. The ultimate survival of the girls is defiance.
Women Who Carry the Story — and the Weight of History
Through her powerful performance in the film, Lumi Lizardo as Gloria brings a quiet, devastating strength. Mostly known in the Dominican Republic for her comedy and drama television roles, Lizardo had to transform her screen persona to play a woman hardened by loss yet softened by loyalty. In Hotel Coppelia, Gloria is the central character. A mother figure to the other characters, protector, and silent witness to her own decay, Gloria is the heart of the story.
In an interview, Lizardo stated the role Gloria was for her was “like carrying the pain of every Dominican mother who had to smile through a broken country.” That generational trauma seemingly described in the interview was truly described in the performance through every line and every pause.
Nashla Bogaert, playing Mariela — the film’s emotional compass, is yet another example. Bogaert, a well-known Dominican Republic actress and producer, was at an even more crucial time in her career when Hotel Coppelia was presented to her. With the known reputation of balancing mainstream stardom with artistic projects, she took this role as a statement as it was part of something raw, politically charged, and female-centered.
Mariela begins as curious and naive, but becomes a quiet symbol of defiance. In a chilling moment, after American soldiers occupy the territory, Mariela walks through an empty brothel: the silence of the scene is broken only by the soft echo of her footsteps, mirroring the ghosts of the women who came before her, the ones who wept and laughed in the building. This is not mere acting. This is a reclamation of one’s story. Later, Bogaert would say, “it’s like standing in the middle of a forgotten truth our generation was never told,” a reference to those scenes in the brothel as a testimony to truth with a haunting absence.
The visual work in Hotel Coppelia is a chilling masterpiece. Hernán Herrera, the cinematographer, depicts the world in smoke and sepia, blurring intimacy with danger. The camera becomes a face in the crowd, capturing loss in the sweat, tears, and lipstick stains of the women, and, in the end, a masterpiece is made of each haunting tableau. The stark contrast of the handheld camera work with the crowd creates a documentary immediacy, an intimacy Cabral’s vision clearly demanded.
The tension created in the sound design surpasses expectations. The faint sound of gunfire, the crack of a fan, and the slow rhythm of bolero expose the concealed, underlying tension of a war. It seeps through the smallest of settings, reminding us that no matter how stifling the circumstances, history refuses to relent.
Some reviewers have observed that Cabral’s direction occasionally slips into melodrama, particularly in the last act of the film, where the violence becomes almost agonizing to sit through. Perhaps that feeling of discomfort was intended — to make the audience face the raw reality of colonial violence and the betrayal of women’s bodies at the intersection of power.
Between Hype and Reality
Hotel Coppelia was described as a landmark for Dominican cinema even before the film was released. With bold subject matter, it made its premiere on HBO Max Latin America in 2021, gaining attention in international circles. Much of the pre-release conversation focused on the film’s bold feminism, as the narrative promised to reclaim forgotten voices in history.
However, the reactions to the film were mixed. While some praised the film for its emotional weight and artistic ambition, others described it as uneven in pacing or heavy-handed in its messaging. Cabral’s boldness in taking on a story that very few Caribbean filmmakers have attempted was evident in even the most critical responses.
The film had a different meaning for Dominican viewers. The 1965 civil war is still one of the most painful and overshadowed moments in Dominican history. Hotel Coppelia brought the unpleasant memories back, focusing on the lost women and not the remembered generals. The film made the audience remember women who had no monuments, only painful memories and silence.
Real Lives Behind the Screen
The cast and crew had their own war to fight. Shooting the film surrounded by a pandemic was a logistical nightmare. Scenes were restructured, locations sanitized, and schedules rearranged. Nashla Bogaert remarked that the uncertainty of filming during such a lockdown created “another layer of fear — one that strangely matched the anxiety of the film’s world.”
You can have a the same type of balance in a negative world. The production was one of the few in the Caribbean to have on-set counselors, for the emotional health of the actresses. Lumi Lizardo said that, “We were all crying, not just for our characters, but for what women still go through.”
Unspoken Consequences
Some people would say Hotel Coppelia would bring controversy. Among the more conservative members of the community, Domincan critics would say this film was “tarnishing national history” by portraying slain soldiers and revolutionaries as morally flawed. Cabral defended his vision, saying, “The truth is uncomfortable because it’s real. These women existed — their silence is our shame.”
The film was not intended, in any of the statements, as a piece of national pride. It sought to evoke a sense humanity. It focused on the type of bravery and dignity people carry in their hearts, and how many of them world truly naked.
This is where Hotel Coppelia shines. It’s not a perfect film by any means; in fact, it is raw, uneven, and painful. It does, however, pulsate with energy. Like the women it centers to honor, it still lingers in the margins of history, in the silence of unspoken, and in the flickering candle warm of the tales we are finally ready to share.
And Hotel Coppelia is not about the film. It’s about the silence soul. It is about moments of woman, in the midst the most center of the storm, finding the will to say, “We were here.”
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