In an apartment above Fifth Avenue, some thirty young people live in a vortex of drug addiction and despair. In The Ninth Floor, Jessica Dimmock enters this world, exploring, in human terms, what has been lost and what may be recovered. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/the-ninth-floor
I recently watched a video on MediaStorm called The Ninth Floor. It is a photographed film by Jessica Dimmock. Dimmock photographed a group of young adults that lived on the ninth floor of a building on fifth avenue that were drug addicts. Drug addiction is something very common especially in a place like New York City. People start doing drugs at a very young age usually as soon as they hit high school, sometimes even earlier. As the world gets more modern it gets easier for younger kids to get drugs. As they get older they don't know how to control themselves and they get addicted to the drugs.
Jessica Dimmock photographed the life of the three main people living in the apartment on the ninth floor named Joe, Jessie, Dionn and Rachel. The apartment was rented by an artist in New York named Joe Smith. Joe began subletting his apartment to other people. Soon enough people stopped paying rent therefore the lights stopped working and the water stopped running. Joe Smith just asked his "roommates" to pay him in drugs and beer. Jessie was hospitalized a couple of times. After she was hospitalized she went to upstate to live with her mother to try and get clean. She says the reason why she and others get addicted is because the first time is such a good time, you feel like you have no worries in the world, no fears, it just feels like you're on a cloud. Jessie says, "And then that's why they say you're chasing the first hit, cause then you're just doing it to try and get that same feeling you got at the begininning, but you never really get that." Dionn and Rachel then had a baby. Rachel still did drugs while she was pregnant so they kept the baby in the hospital for a while. After the baby was born Dionn wanted nothing but the best for her. "I was 120 milligrams of methadone when she was conceived, by the time she was born i was on 50, and now i'm completely off." Joe Smith was hospitalized many times and no one really knew what happend to him.
I think this is a great film because of how raw it is. Instead of telling you about these people's lives it takes us inside of it. It makes you feel like you're in the room with them experiencing it all because it doesn't hold anything back. You don't see a lot of films like this, where a photographer takes you inside the lives of different people with different stories and different experiences. These people have different stories to tell, but they all seem to connect, they all go back to the same place, the ninth floor.
