Haringey Independent Cinema Screening Present ESTATE: A REVERIE.

Dir: Andrea Luka Zimmerman |2015 | UK | 83min | Cert 15 |

Thursday December 13th
Doors open at 7pm and the film starts at 7:15

Estate, a Reverie is a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity in the face of social housing estates being ripped apart by capitalist forces seemingly intent on bulldozing the heart out of London’s communities.

The film documents the residents of the Haggerston Estate in Hackney over a period of seven years of waiting, before the estate was demolished in 2014 to make way for a redevelopment boasting “luxurious penthouses … on the fringe of the City”. Artist and filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman 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 still a home to her and many others.

Her film gives the residents a voice and a visual presence, interweaving intimate portraits of everyday life with the residents’ own historical re-enactments and dramatised scenes, countering the many myths and clichés of their mainstream representation with images of resilience, strength, and a celebration of spirited existence regardless of the social and economic hand they had been dealt.

Zimmerman explains: “The shared living came first. The film followed as an expression of commitment and gratitude to the people with whom I shared 17 years of life. However, it is of course also an interrogation of the political and social forces that lead people to become marginalized and increasingly overlooked and ignored by the wider political and social realm.

“The film also seeks to challenge what a documentary about housing might be, even at this time of acute crisis within UK housing. It was a very conscious decision to move away from the statistical and expository towards a poetics of everyday life. It seeks to inhabit the reverie of the title, offering a certain tone of memory, subjective of course, but one grounded in a common experience of living within difference. This is perhaps a kind of utopian possibility, formed by the shared time of living in an environment confirmed for erasure.”