Starts:
06:45pm, Wednesday, 18 January 2023
Until:
08:20pm, Wednesday, 18 January 2023
Venue
Cinema 1
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS
Tickets
Standard:
£12
AF Members:
£10 (Please contact AF for promotional discount code)
Concessions:
£11
Under 18:
£6
Young Barbican:
£5
Tel (9am-8pm):
+44 (0)20 7638 8891
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel [London Premiere]
An intimate stay at NYC’s mythical Chelsea through a portrait of its last remaining residents, and ghosts of those past, as the building is transformed from artistic refuge to luxury hotel.
With delicate poetry and objective empathy Dreaming Walls accompanies a handful of the hotel’s holdouts as they step over the construction workers that surround them and live amidst the noise and chaos of a decade long renovation, as the iconic countercultural building – immortalised by Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, and so many more – has its storied interior gutted to make way for a very different clientele.
Guided by a charismatic octogenarian choreographer who for decades has called the Chelsea home, the film underlines how it is people that make places, in a memorial for, and celebration of, the legendary – if fading – space for eccentricity promised by New York.
Merging rich 16mm images with archival memories of the building’s past, and lodging amongst the final tenants embodying the place’s historic spirit, the film performs an ode to a place, a city, and a set of urban possibilities, on the brink of disappearance through the onward march of change.
Amélie van Elmbt, Maya Duverdier, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Qatar, 2021, 90 mins