![]() ![]() ![]() I wasn’t getting beaten up or nothing but it was bad, my sister-in-law said come to Florida, and if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have come.” There’s a lot of stress but all I need is a roof over my head, a room to sleep in and I’m good Robin Wilde “I was depressed every day because it was a bad situation. “Stuff happened, it’s a long story, I met someone online and moved to Philadelphia,” she said. She arrived in Florida about eight years ago after living in California, Nevada, Texas and Pennsylvania. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/The GuardianĪnother long-term resident of the Magic Castle is Robin Wilde, 57, from Oregon. Not everybody’s on drugs, even if the movie made it look that way.” “There are people that work, there’s a woman here on the second floor who works two jobs to look after her disabled sister. “Just because everyone lives in a hotel, doesn’t mean they’re all the same,” he said. Despite its position at the heart of the state’s booming tourist industry, filled with restaurants and attractions as diverse as airboat rides and even a machine gun shooting range, the statistics are perhaps surprising: there are high levels of crime and a poverty rate of 25.6%, according to the US census bureau, more than 10% above the national average.Įven so, Delgado is keen for people to know that life for the motel dwellers is not always as grim as it sounds. Kissimmee, rather than Orlando, is Disney World’s unofficial dormitory town, home to many workers plus the majority of tourists who flock to central Florida for the sunshine and theme parks. If you’re backed into a corner they’ll lend you money or let you have money and let you work it out another way.” ‘This place is ghetto enough’ “I fell behind on rent a couple of times and they came up and said, ‘Do you want to work here?’ and I said OK. “The owners are really nice,” Delgado said. They make ends meet by helping out the owner at the front desk. Between them, the family share two tiny rooms at the Magic Castle. That will leave his fiancee, Dilma, to look after their child, with help from his mother Gladys and 22-year-old brother Christian, who works at a fast-food restaurant nearby. He begins a new job driving trucks across the country this week, although it will take him away from home for six weeks at a time. A fake landlord rented him a foreclosed apartment with a bogus lease and he was evicted. Things are improving for Delgado, 30, who says he moved into the Magic Castle five years ago when he fell victim to a property scam. Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in The Florida Project. “When you go for jobs and you tell them you live in a hotel they look at you like, ‘Why should we hire you?’ So the people out here, they don’t want to try.” They said, ‘You can’t show that you pay rent so why should we give you a car?’ “I tried to finance a car and they didn’t want to give me the loan because I live in a hotel, they called me homeless. The stigma attached being a permanent hotel-dweller is one of the hardest obstacles to overcome, Delgado said. You look at those places, you know where you should be and you know where you shouldn’t be.” “There was a woman living here with five kids in a small room. People will call social services if they see something going on. There’s guys that will come from Disney and rent a room for just 45 minutes, that’s a part of it, you’ll see it in the movie. “This area is good in certain parts but there’s still crime, there’s prostitution and that happens a lot. There was a woman living here with five kids in a small room, that was pretty tough Tommy Delgado “There’s a lot of people who live in these rooms with their kids, there’s a lot of drug addicts that need help, they don’t get that help here. “Some of the stuff in the movie, this really does happen,” he said. He has been a stay-at-home dad to his toddler, Mason, since leaving his last job as a trucker three months ago. But the scenes of poverty, depression and deprivation it conveys, and the juxtaposition of living in the direct shadow of Disney World, the self-proclaimed happiest place on earth, are all too real to Delgado. The story is fictional and the real-life Magic Castle, a shabby, bright pink, low-budget hotel where Baker shot the film, is nowhere near as seedy as its big-screen portrayal. ![]() It is a dark existence brought vividly into focus by director Sean Baker in his gritty movie The Florida Project, which tells of the day-to-day struggles of two residents of the Magic Castle, a six-year-old livewire named Moonee and her mom Halley, a single mother who turns to prostitution when waitressing falls through. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/The Guardian ![]()
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