Intimate Distances

Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air is an only-in-New-York account of Ming, Al, and Antoine Yates, who cohabited in a high-rise social housing apartment at Drew-Hamilton complex in Harlem for several years until 2003, when news of their dwelling caused a public outcry and collective outpouring of disbelief. On the discovery that Ming was a 500-pound pound Tiger and Al a seven-foot alligator, their story took on an astonishing dimension. The film frames Yates’s recollections with a poetic study of Ming and Al, the predators’ presence combined with a text by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, reimagining the circumstances of the wild inside, animal names, strange territories, and human-animal relations.

Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies in a number of visual and literary passages exploring his onscreen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea. Outlandish is a journey between shores and environments, the touching of and proximity between bodies, the vanishing and appearance of crew, dimensions of form and, above all, our relations with strange foreign bodies.

"Familiar places are those that have incorporated themselves within us" Jean-Luc Nancy

Natasha Demkina is the girl with X-ray eyes. Her claim, to be able to see unaided, directly inside of bodies.

Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman's identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.

Mia, an aspiring actress, serves lattes to movie stars in between auditions and Sebastian, a jazz musician, scrapes by playing cocktail party gigs in dingy bars, but as success mounts they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.