The Monterey is a single room occupancy (SRO) hotel housing the disadvantaged and marginalized in New York City. Over an approximate twelve hour overnight period, cameras, with no audio, film in and outside the hotel: the human and mechanical workings of the hotel, the movements of some of its residents (who seem aware but nonplussed by the presence of the camera itself), inside some of the rooms with their specific resident, with a final montage in the early morning dawn of a panorama of the hotel exterior. The early scenes are with the camera stationary merely observing what happens in front of its lens. Some of the scenes inside the actual units with their respective residents are still photographs which present in particular a sense of desolation. Some of the final scenes allow the camera to pan, most specifically up and down hallways, to provide a more active view of what is happening inside the hotel.
—Huggo