"Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets"

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Film still from "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets," directed by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross (USA, 2020).

In an unglamorous area of Las Vegas, a small bar known as The Roaring 20s is closing down. There is a little farewell party organized to celebrate its last day of business. From morning until the early hours, regular customers parade there, making this watering hole their second home and their drinking companions, their family. Forgotten actors, musicians with drug addictions, war veterans and a handful of wounded individuals—with lives that have taken their toll on them—drink and philosophize, hug, love and hate one another, and above all, keep each other company. The day passes and night comes. The bar is filling up. Some people enter and others leave. Tomorrow, the door will remain closed. Tomorrow, everything will be more difficult.

The Ross brothers play with the boundaries of fiction in this semi-constructed documentary that shows the last day of a dive bar on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Lonely characters, lost in a life that has been hard on them, drink and live the best way they can, hiding behind an alcohol consumption that helps them fraternize, while crushing them. Shot with a great sensitivity towards its characters, but also with great strength, the film features fascinating dialogues, textures, and perspective. As if it were a John Huston film, the camera captures endearing and colorful individuals without any possibility of redemption, who ended where they are now because of years of excesses and bad decisions. In that microcosm, they love and relate to each other, but they seem unable to extend their relationships beyond that familiar, welcoming space where they bond over drinks. Tomorrow, they will have to get up again. Life will go on. But the bar will be closed for good.

Film will be screened in original version with subtitles in Spanish.

A film in the 2026 edition the Americana Film Festival.

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