Some Kind of Life is the result of working with people in Peterborough (UK) who have been, or still are, homeless. The films explore,through personal narratives, a constellation of issues implicated in being ‘on the street’. The shorter films act as individual portraits, while the longer film draws upon these to articulate a more complex narrative.
The stories we are told offer brief glimpses, often nothing more. Sometimes there is only one opportunity to talk, maybe a second one, rarely more than that. Arrangements are made and changed and rearranged and then cancelled; people’s lives are often chaotic. On occasion we are offered an invitation into a person’s lifeworld. We listen to their stories, attempting to tease out the narrative threads of their lives. The stories tell of the spaces they inhabit and from which they draw their sense of self, and how they acknowledge a complex web of relations embedded in their notion of place, at once known and familiar, but also imagined and memorialised.
Some Kind of Life challenges assumptions about what constitutes home and how people understand their own sense of belonging.
Teresa Cairns/Denis Doran November 2012
Short films
Below we show five short films which were steps on the way to the full documentary.
