Director Monica Strømdahl’s “Flophouse America” provides a visceral documentation of poverty in America. Flophouses are cheap, run-down motels where many people are forced to live when they cannot afford better housing. For her feature documentary debut, Strømdahl spent many years touring such places in America and taking photos of their inhabitants. Then she met Mikal, whose story she tells in “Flophouse America,” and decided stills were not enough. Since he was underage while the footage was being shot, the filmmakers waited for him to become an adult to get his consent to share his story.

The director’s insistence on no-frills digital photography adds to the grittiness of the images, rendering them profoundly real. As the film opens, a matter-of-fact, unemotional voice shares statistics about children living with poverty, parental abuse and alcoholism in the United States, as the numbers flash in simple white text on a black screen.