La Voz de Galicia – November 15, 2024 →
It was a documentary about what the renovation project of New York’s historic Chelsea Hotel means for the lives of those who still live there. At the same time, it was a documentary about what it means to have once been something and then become invisible, about change and the passage of time. In “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel”, directors Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt create a beautifully poignant portrait of loneliness through the lives of the oldest residents of an institution that witnessed most of the 20th century’s cultural movements. A hotel that also welcomed long-term residents, many of whom organized themselves to avoid eviction during the building’s sale, becoming a metaphor for what it means to survive in New York.
The documentary focuses, among others, on the nonagenarian and eccentric artist Bettina Grossman, the octogenarian dancer Merle Lister, and the octogenarian composer Gerald Busby. Unlike other documentaries, this one doesn’t have a narrative voice, nor a thread guiding us; here, it’s up to you to choose how you want to look at all these stories that are hinted at but never fully told.
I suppose it’s because I’ve spent the past couple of years trying to write a story about loneliness that, watching the film, I felt a chill that left me thinking for days. “How is it possible to have lived so much and end up so alone?” I asked myself. “And what’s wrong with that?” I replied. The stories of the elderly residents of the Chelsea Hotel are not so different from our own: when we stop being who we once were, we disappear. And if we are not seen, do we cease to exist?
