Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel (2007)

When aggressive developers purchase a crumbling flophouse hotel to turn it into an arts-and-music hot spot, long-time staff and residents worry that they'll be squeezed out. The developers' plan--a gradual restoration seeing staff and residents remain upstairs while the bar serves designer drinks to affluent clientèle downstairs--doesn't work. An experimental filmmaker inherits the mess and forms a "business model that includes social change," but the hotel has the last word. City inspectors demand complete rewiring, the boiler blows up, ceilings leak, walls crumble, and everybody must go. Shot over five years in a cinema-direct style, this intimate and compelling portrait of the effects of urban renewal upon the poor reveals the unintentional roles we often play in gentrification.