Sunshine Hotel

Documentary - 2001

Just decades ago, flophouses in New York housed nearly 25,000 men living on the margins of society. Today few remain. Filmmaker Michael Dominic takes his camera behind the doors of the Sunshine Hotel, one of the few remaining affordable refuges for the destitute and out of luck, a world that has seemingly stood still for more than eight decades. Here the hotel residents live in tiny four-by-six-foot cubicles crowned by a ceiling of chicken wire. Focusing on several of the Sunshine’s denizens – including a transgender woman saving all her money for additional surgeries and a hotel manager who doubles as its resident philosopher – Dominic presents a non-judgmental snapshot of a diverse group of characters as memorable as the characters at Harry Hope’s bar in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.”