Sarah Abu Abdallah & Joey L DeFrancesco

The film is a collaborative effort of young video artist Sarah Abu Abdallah (born 1990 in Saudi Arabia) and Joey L DeFrancesco (born 1988 in the United States), a visual artist, musician, performer and labour union activist.

Relying on memory and forms of self-documentation, this collaborative video piece takes an absurdist look on daily life and the crushing aspects of mundane work. The script and the figure of the protagonist, played by DeFrancesco, derive from the artist’s experiences as a former hotel room service attendant (the film, in which Joey submits his resignation to his boss accompanied by a brass quintet has tallied more than 3 million views on YouTube).

Abu Abdallah’s and DeFrancesco’s film is a reflection on the precarious economic circumstances faced by young people and on the search for a survival strategy in the face of the modern world’s dynamics of power and alienation.