The Deceptively Simple Need for a Home (on Other People’s Land)

Alana Hunt
Australia | 2026 | 21 min
World premiere
Language : English
Subtitles : French

A woman revisits her 14 childhood homes as one might reread a personal diary. The camera, with its static grace, allows the memories to flow. A wall leaks, a tree becomes a friend, a body changes, Diana dies, a mother struggles. Between anecdotes and pivotal events, a political consciousness takes shape: for these homes are built on Aboriginal land.

“In this rented house”: the phrase accompanies each house plan like a refrain. The narrator summons her memories and sensations, slowly piecing together the story of a happy childhood: pets, imaginary games, the first stirrings of emotion, yet marked by the precarity of never being entirely at home. Unplanned roommates, horrible neighbours, a leaky roof. Implicitly, the portrait also emerges of a mother who struggles to provide stability, relocates furniture as if attempting to shift fate, counts pennies, moves again, and holds on... However, seen in the Australian context, the basic, universal need for a home leads to colonial violence: every house is built on the displacement of other lives. Growing up then becomes understanding, and personal memory becomes collective history. Poised between tenderness and lucidity, this sensitive, critical film whispers to us that to inhabit, sometimes, is also to reside in the absence of others.

Anne Delseth

The Deceptively Simple Need for a Home (on Other People's Land), 2026

Sharjah Film Platform 7, 2024
Surveilling a Crime Scene, 2023