The Motel

Ernest Chin, who is thirteen, both lives and works at a motel that rents rooms by the hour on the edge of a road going nowhere. His family does not understand him, and adolescence is arriving on its own. He becomes friends with Sam Kim, a Korean man who checks in; Sam has charm but is wrecking his own life along the way. Whatever the fatherless boy learns about being a man, he learns from him. The film does not romanticise the relationship; it leaves you with the fact that the man the boy is copying cannot look after himself either. Jeffrey Chyau and Sung Kang appear in Michael Kang’s seventy five minute American film, completed in 2005.