Hotel Chelsea

Directed by Amélie van Elmbt, Maya Duverdier, BE, FR, NL, SE, USA, 2022, 80 min., English with Czech subtitles

The legendary New York hotel Chelsea used to be a safe haven for the most famous underground artists and musicians in the 60ties – including Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix. But this is not a film about them. Darkly poetic film with an immersive atmosphere captures their shadows, but is mostly a melancholic portrait of the fascinating and dying spirit of the hotel itself – kept alive by its current inhabitants. The quirky characters of its curious tenants – artists, weirdos and veterans – refused to leave the hotel even during its almost decade lasting reconstruction into a generic “trendy” spot. Thanks to them the hotel remained untouched as an autonomous organism in which dreams live even though its walls rot and something new is only now being born…