Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air

MING OF HARLEM: TWENTY ONE StOREYS IN THE AIR is an ‘only in New york’ multi-layered account of Ming, Al and Antoine yates, who co-habited in a high-rise apartment in the Drew hamilton houses in Harlem for several years until 2003, when news of their dwelling caused a public outcry and collective outpouring of disbelief. On the discovery that Ming was a five-hundred pound tiger and Al a seven-foot Alligator, their story took on an astonishing dimension. MING OF HARLEM: TWENtY ONE STOREYS IN THE AIR frames Yates’ recollections with a poetic study of Ming and Al, the prodigious predators combined with a text by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy elaborating and re-imagining the circumstances of the wild inside. Warnell’s debut feature film forays into the screening of displaced species as integral to a conceptual, cinematic and fractured narrative agenda, in the process advancing through strange living circumstances and outlandish territories.