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Welcome to the Terminal Bar, one of the meanest watering-holes in Manhattan where, over the course of 10 years, bartender Sheldon Nadelman took more than 2,500 photos of the drinkery's low-life customers. In this film, his son Stefan uses these haunting black-and-white portraits to introduce the old-timers, winos, junkies, drag queens, criminals and cooks who hung out there, revealing the bar's secret history.
Stefan Nadelman's film is extremely moving, loaded with pathos, funny, nasty, nostalgic and extremely entertaining. The director uses montage techniques enabled by digital processing to load this film with as many of his father's phenomenal photographs as possible. And for a man who claims to have spent a good deal of his working life as a second generation bartender and bouncer, Sheldon Nadelman's 'snapshots' are simply amazing. Pushing the possibilities of just what a documentary can be, don't miss this compact classic which earned the Grand Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking at Sundance.