Dreaming Walls

Step inside New York’s iconic Chelsea Hotel as a decade-long refurbishment nears completion, and meet its colourful residents and illustrious proverbial ghosts.

The Chelsea Hotel’s rich history has been immortalised in books, films and countless songs. Throughout the 20th century, it housed such figures as Andy Warhol, Oscar Wilde, Janis Joplin, Salvador Dalí, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and Madonna. Once a de facto artistic utopia, the hotel has more recently been owned by developers keen to lure in the tourist dollar. A major renovation has been underway for nearly 10 years, transforming the 12-storey building into a luxury boutique space. But tenants remain – most of them elderly – holding out amid the chaos of gutted rooms and exposed wires. Some are looking forward to the dust settling; others dread what this new corporatised era will usher in.

Combining archival footage with the Chelsea’s present-day reality, Belgian filmmakers Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier evoke nostalgia for a world that is fading away yet avoid the pitfalls of a simplistic investigation into the hotel’s legacy and notorious past residents (who do appear as projections on the hotel’s actual walls). Dreaming Walls is impressionistic and unsentimental – a melancholy tribute to the creative spirit as it resists the march of capitalism.

“A palimpsest of significant cultural proportions that offers a sobering glimpse of what big business does to culture … [and] an ode to the dying embers of an old New York.” – Little White Lies