Films A to Z

The camera hovers, lost in reverie as voices and sounds waft through the gutted rooms of a building. Archive footage is sometimes projected onto unplastered walls and at others used as a soundtrack as we continue our tour. This is the legendary Chelsea Hotel, famous as the preferred abode of New York’s bohemia from the 1950s to the 1980s. Here, bourgeois society’s misfits – sex workers, poets, queers and artists – were able to find cheap accommodation and form alliances. In this documentary, the remaining tenants from that era grant access to their flats and give us an insight into their lives. They are the focus of a film that interweaves the present with the ghosts of the past. The completion of eight years of luxury refurbishment ahead of the building’s reopening as a hotel is eagerly awaited by some residents and dreaded by others.

By portraying the dissenters and the rooms they inhabit in such a touching way, the filmmakers have succeeded in capturing a kaleidoscopic image of an era that embraces both the pain of loss and the joy of living; that bids a fond farewell as it points towards immortality.