Sirens, screams, laughter, singing, bartering: these are the sounds sweeping into the rooms of Downtown Los Angeles' old forgotten hotels. Their inhabitants' stories tell of lives lived on the margins. Some residents stay for a few months. Others have lived there for as long as 40 years. According to Charlie, the desk clerk at the King Edward Hotel, “you can be anything you want; you can do anything you want - and nobody gives a damn!” After all, we’re on America’s most notorious skid row, also known to old-timers as the Nickel.

Director Alina Skrzeszewska also lived in one of the hotels for a year and a half, while shooting the film. The result is a strikingly intimate portrait of people living in this largely invisible community. Their lives speak of both desperation and beauty, while subtly resisting the encroaching gentrification. A layered image of America’s diverse urban landscape unfolds, with all its fractures and traumas, as well as its potential.

Alina Skrzeszewska was born in Wroclaw/Poland. During the politically charged years after the outbreak of the Solidarity movement her family emigrated to West Germany and Alina grew up in Munich. She studied Stage Design and Art&Media at the University of the Arts in Berlin and received an MFA in Film&Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Alina's work meanders between essayistic and documentary forms. Her films often talk about fringes, borders, boundaries: be they spaces that carry borders within them, or people whose lives are somehow fractured. Songs from the Nickel (2010) is her first documentary feature.