Niagara Motel (NR)

synopsis

In Niagara Motel, several struggling individuals cross paths at a low-rent motel in the tourist Mecca of Niagara Falls. They are not tourists and they are all, for various reasons, at crisis points in their lives. The main characters are: a knockout waitress being recruited to star in low budget porn videos, a young couple with criminal pasts struggling to recover their child from social services and a middle class husband and wife whose marriage is disintegrating. The story also includes the woeful drunken motel manager, a prostitute working to support two children, a small time hustler, an underachieving staple salesman, the Serbian owner of the motel, his physics studying daughter and a social worker with a Christian bias. The needs of these people, their obvious failings and the unlucky conditions of their lives make them so vulnerable that they careen from the disturbing to the hilarious in a breathless instant. In this story, tragedy waltzes with unpredictable comedy in an intense dance of life.