Housing (2009)

• 72%
• 2009
• Documentary
• Federica di Giacomo

They're clinging, as though shipwrecked, to the walls of a house. This is being played out in certain neighborhoods where a dwelling is the only thing people possess. For over twenty years in Bari no new social housing has been assigned and three thousand families are on the waiting list. Inevitably, a silent war among paupers has broken out, a war in which squatters lay siege to the lodgings of anyone careless enough to leave home for a few hours too many, whether to visit a relative or to keep a hospital appointment. The squatters mainly target the houses of old or single people. They stake their claim on the basis that they are large families and it is difficult to make them leave. The film relates the stories of four people whose every move or initiative is dictated by the fear of losing their house. They are constantly looking for survival strategies. Though they are in legitimate possession of their homes, in practice it is their homes which possess them. The home as a prison is the metaphor which runs parallel to the everyday ambition to have "a roof over one's head". "Housing" reveals the crazy, grotesque ordeal of the daily obsession with housing problems.