Ming of Harlem - Twenty One Storeys in the Air

When Antoine Yates entered a New York hospital with a large bite wound in 2003, the staff alerted the police because the wound appeared to be caused by something bigger than the pit bull Yates described. They were right: in his fifth floor apartment in Harlem, the police found Ming, an adult Bengal tiger. And in one of the rooms lived an adult alligator by the name of Al. . This poem written especially for the film expresses the sense of friction at the heart of the tale: the apparently irreconcilable realities of the giant predator within the walls of the apartment and the man, one imagines, reading the paper and doing the dishes. Filmmaker Phillip Warnell makes this friction palpable in a 20-minute section in the middle of the film. Yates also gets an opportunity to talk about his life and his bizarre cohabitation with his pets. In one of the final scenes, it suddenly becomes clear what he was looking for with Ming and Al.