How Now, House?

The boundaries between past, present and future blur as a shared house becomes the focal point of a hypnotic meditation on the passing of time.

In this mesmerising short, Tess Martin uses an unremarkable Rotterdam town house as her prism for an absorbing investigation into the traces humans leave on the spaces they occupy. As former residents recount memories of past lives, the filmmaker employs timelapse, double exposures and playful editing to demonstrate the way the building has been shaped — both visibly and invisibly — by the many people who have called it their home over the years. Beneath layers of paint and wallpaper, tales of loss, grief, friendship and bad landlords are slowly revealed, while a physicist comments on the subjectivity of human perceptions of time. Meanwhile, through the windows, drifting clouds and changing light mark the passing hours.