#activist documentary

Check out this piece co-produced Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (CLDI ‘13) on food, fairness and a community creating its own resources. 

An unruly celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity!

A 1930s block is bulldozed, a luxury-apartment-complex rises: tracking the passing of utopian principles of social housing. Filmed over 7 years, Estate seeks to reveal and celebrate the resilience of residents who are both stereotyped and profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents' own historical re-enactments and dramatised reveries Estate asks how we resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, through geography even?

Synopsis: Samuel House, the final block in Hackney’s Haggerston estate has been demolished this autumn, exemplar of a nationwide, even international, shift in the character and fabric of the inner cities. I lived in Samuel House for 17 years, at a time when the estate had been abandoned by Hackney Council and allowed to fall into dereliction, both architecturally and socially. Nevertheless, this was home to me and to many others. My film Estate, a documentary essay filmed over 7 years, seeks to reveal and celebrate the resilience of residents who are both stereotyped and profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. It follows an earlier building-wide site-specific photography project and an exploratory book of essays and images.

It feels important to say that Estate has not been made about this community, but has been made from it. Through a variety of filmic registers and strategies, the film seeks to capture the genuinely utopian quality of the last few years of the buildings’ existence, a period when, because demolition was inevitable, a sense of the possible, of the emergence of new, but of course time-specific, social and organizational relationships developed, alongside a fresh understanding of how the residents might occupy the spaces of the estate.

Estate focuses on the ‘structure’ of its eponymous architecture not only because it is where we live, but also how we live. The film explores the multiple implications of what most explicitly defines us to other people, while simultaneously challenging that often all too monocultural definition and revealing the complex diversity of the population it houses.

Estate is, inevitably therefore, about housing, and about the policies that lead us to live lives at the mercy of governmental and financial decisions. But, much more, I hope, it is about how we belong in the world and what structures of meaning exist to define personal and social lives. How do we resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, through geography even? How can we express the fullest possibility of our being, creatively and collectively?