Output details

Home Sweet Home [Film]

Home Sweet Home interrogates the social, political, economic and aesthetic vision that informs a radical urban regeneration scheme. It asks what insights this process offers on the current transformation of British society? What new ideas of social inclusion and sustainable development are articulated and literally built into the fabric of the city by architecture, urban design and planning practice? What does belonging mean to the inhabitants of a modern city? And to whom does the city belong?

These questions are explored via engagement with the filmmaking process as a critical and creative mode of research - a practice that “overlaps with issues around knowledge production associated with the social sciences” (Wayne, 2008) - and with documentary as form. This practice is particularly well-equipped to decipher and render the complex process of shaping the physical and social urban Space in Time, and has the potential to deliver novel insights and lived and embodied knowledge unique to this research method.

The film’s interrogative journey moves between two polarities – on one hand, the city and the forces at play in its transformation; on the other, the self, the individual, the citizen, the local filmmaker. It negotiates its own personal space, identity and belonging within this context. The multi-perspective architecture of its narrative structure takes issue with the ‘unique truth’ and the ‘objectivity’ of the ‘subject researcher’, experimenting with modes of narration capable of reflecting this multilayered reality. The participatory observational approach is also interrogated and challenged via this process and dialogues with other modes of representation, such as first-person narrative and archival footage.

Co-produced by Serge Lalou, Les film d'ici (France) and Sandra Whipham (UK) for ARTE France, Home Sweet Home premiered at Opencity Docs Fest (shortlisted for Time Out Best City Film award) and was shown at various film festivals, including Turin.