Le souci du toit

How can we make a home when fear has made itself at home in the backs of our minds, whispering, “What if you lose it all?” This week, we’re taking a front-row seat to the most intimate, vulnerable, hidden and cast-out corners of the housing crisis. We remind you that this word *housing*, now tinged with connotations of misery, anonymity and defeat, once carried a great deal of dignity. Before being a luxury, a commodity, a financial venture more profitable than gold, before it mutated into these forms that now colonize our understanding, housing was, above all, a right. A living environment. Our whole universe.

RESIDENCE A promise, a problem, a demand: a residence. In the most abstract of terms, residing describes a relationship to space and time. Yet this is no place for metaphors. Everything is cut and dried: residing in a space for a set time, because don’t we need to stay somewhere a certain amount of time before we feel at home? There are no metaphors either, no room for abstraction in the minds and bodies of thousands of people in thousands of cities around the world when they feel, in every nerve, with the objective and vertigo-inducing accelerations of every real estate market, that a residence is, for them, a luxury that is hanging by a thread.  When residing in a space is so fraught, losing one’s residence becomes an obsession, a perpetual source of anxiety, a ghoul haunting our cities. In the shadows of every residence lurks the possibility of eviction. Between the concrete and the long shadows cast by the buildings we, as spectators, weigh the many real meanings of eviction.  

UNDERGROUND FORCES In an almost desperate move to see political documentary cinema meet one of its objectives, by giving us the sensitive conceptual tools needed to understand reality and then transform it, we present Fredrik Gertten’s Push. This overview is easily the most didactic of this weeks’ films, but it remains a must-see if we really want to reflect on the epidemic spread of concerns about keeping the roof.

BUILD SITES With House, Israeli director Amos Gitaï’s black and white anthology documentary, the dissident filmmaker shines a light on the multiplied injustice of private property under the context of occupation. Both a symbolic and material figure of Palestinian history, Gitaï’s house tells a story of absence and occupation, of its former residents now forced into exile and of the injustice that is sometimes born from ruins.  The asserted artistic approach of Taste of Cement creates an association overlaying destruction and (re)construction, by observing the unenviable living conditions of Syrian refugees working in Lebanon. It serves as a reminder that private property thrives on inequality, often with total disregard for the common good.  

LIVING ENVIRONMENT Rabot presents a life-size portrait of an apartment building in Belgium on the brink of its demolition. Capturing the violence, indifference and solidarity contained within the tower’s walls, the film juxtaposes a multitude of solitudes with the refuges that many apartments often became.  We usually think of motels as a temporary place to stay where we get a brief chance to break out of our daily routines. Vacancy offers a different perspective entirely. The rundown Palace Inn and Roy’s Motel, like hundreds of other motels, have become either an anchor point for many who have slipped between the strands of an inhumane social safety net, or the complicated starting point for a new and obligatory stage of life. 

PROGRAMMING

Stéphanie Bourbeau Philosophy teacher

Hubert Sabino-Brunette Teacher, programmer