In the United States, the official poverty rate is 10.6%. Due to a lack of affordable housing, many families spend months, sometimes years, in hotel rooms. Still according to statistics, nearly one in ten children grow up in a home where at least one parent is an alcoholic. Mikal, 12, is one of them.
He has never known anything other than the small room of a hotel in Portland, in the northwest of the United States, where family belongings are piled up. His bed is separated from that of his parents – both addicted to alcohol – by a simple curtain. A single room for living, sleeping and eating; the dishes are done in the bathtub before drying on a chest of drawers.
For three years, director Monica Stromdahl filmed the daily life of this boy with pale skin and light hair in this domestic chamber. There are these suspended days, spent going in circles between four walls, where nothing seems to happen, except his mother smoking cigarette after cigarette, while he plays video games, punctuated by cuddling with his cat.
Tensions and tenderness intertwine
There are also great moments of tenderness, like when his parents encourage him to succeed in school so as not to experience the same fate as them. And then there are the other days, those when tensions explode. Where Mikal, at the end of his tether, begs his mother to stop pouring vodka on the cat that he already had to wash the day before and where, in a poignant scene, he shouts to his father that he would rather be locked in a box without seeing anyone than live with them.
“Your parents are fucked up, welcome to this world!” »
“It’s not as bad as you think,” his father replies. But Mikal retorts: “It’s because you don’t know what you do when you’re drunk.” Maybe it’s actually worse than you think. » “Your parents are fucked up, welcome to this world!” “, continues his father, assuring him that “life” goes on.
And this is precisely what Monica Stromdahl manages to show with great accuracy: in the midst of chaos, something persists, and life continues on its way, despite everything.
The selection of La Croix
Mikal, growing up and getting by
Documentary available on Arte.tv
