Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air

director: Phillip Warnell

original title: Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air

country: United Kingdom, United States, Belgium

year: 2014

running time: 71 min.

synopsis

Despite the outrage and indignation of his fellow New Yorkers, Antoine Yates and his animal friends – a 250-kilo Bengal tiger and a two-meter-long alligator – spent several years living together in his Harlem flat. Warnell’s investigative film essay on the relationship between humanity and animality takes Yates’s statements from the time when the public learned of his cohabiting with dangerous animals, and juxtaposes them with poetic footage of the predators moving freely around his flat. The director is less interested in the sensational case from 2003 than in exploring more universal and intimate aspects of people’s communication with animals, and their behavior in a domesticated setting.

DETAIL:
“People really don’t understand, like, when they took him away is, like is almost, like, taken a part of me away. It’s like cut to a piece your soul. Part of me is just gone.”

biography

This British artist, who also studied at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, frequently collaborates with the BFI and with universities in Cambridge and Kingston. Jihlava audiences will remember his documentary shorts The Girl with X-ray Eyes (2008), about a Moscow medical student with supernatural powers, and Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (2009), on which he collaborated with philosopher Jean- Luc Nancy. Ming of Harlem is his feature-length debut.

more about film

director:	Phillip Warnell
cast:	Antoine Yates, Rajiv the Tiger, Brianna the alligator, Johnny Garrett-Graham, Willow Samuel, Mabel Stark
producer:	Madeleine Molyneaux, Phillip Warnell
photography:	David Raedeker
editing:	Chiara Armentano, Phillip Warnell
music:	Hildur Guðnadóttir
sound:	David Hocs, Adam Gutch, Chu-Li Shewring

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