Flophouse America – Films – Visions du Réel

Monica Strømdahl
Norway, Netherlands | 2025 | 78 min
Swiss Premiere
Language : English
Subtitles : French

Mikal shares a shabby motel room with his parents, mired in poverty and substance abuse. Despite his troubled and chaotic family situation, the boy does well in school, is loved, and dreams of a better life. More than anything, Mikal wishes that his mother would stop drinking. But what conditions need to be in place for someone to truly change?

Flophouse America reveals the all-too-real flipside of MAGA triumphalism: 38 million poor Americans still live in motels, and one in ten children grows up in a family ravaged by alcoholism. “I am one of them,” Mikal tells us, looking straight into the camera. Now an adult, he first met Norwegian filmmaker Monica Strømdahl at the age of eleven, when he was living with his parents, Jason and Tonya, and his cat Smokey, in a cramped motel room in Portland. It is that time in his life that Strømdahl unfolds in her film. Through a series of still, composed shots, she captures the raw intensity of the conflicts caused by alcohol and forced proximity — a reality Mikal is forced to navigate far too young. He does relatively well at school. At "home", he retreats into video games behind the curtain that separates his couch from his parents’ bed, or into the hallways of the motel, where he gives voice in a kind of chanted, hyperreal poetry, to his pain and his desperate longing to escape the “black abyss” where love and hatred intertwine. With empathy and restraint, Strømdahl’s camera frames, absorbs, and upholds Mikal’s quiet courage in the face of an existential struggle: the story of a family against whom the cards are stacked, yet bound by an unbreakable thread.
Emmanuel Chicon

Flophouse America, 2025