Estate, A Reverie

Estate, a Reverie tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in Hackney, London, and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity.

Filmed over seven years, Estate, a Reverie reveals and celebrates the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents' own historical re-enactments, landscape and architectural studies and dramatised scenes, Estate, a Reverie asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography...

With the material we shot, Estate, a Reverie could easily have been a more expository film; the backstory of tireless campaigning; the bigger story of social housing in Britain, but it is all the more powerful for simply foregrounding residents. The focus is clear throughout – the people are the story of the estate. There are no affectations. We bear witness to how they live, often with hardship, often a result of policy that overlooks them but a community of neighbours who do not. It is political in a quiet and most personal way. Andrea’s decision to make the film solely about residents is a generous act, giving them the time and space in process and in public that is not usually afforded to them. To me, the film is not only about the estate it is the estate. Documentary filmmaking, as Andrea has explained to me and her neighbours, is a precious medium that can build its argument through enduring encounter – offering time, the duration of shared experience, and space, as both its subject in the abstract and the actual material environments of its content, as active components. The film is the time and space of the estate – the long years of limbo in too-small flats and the moment of sudden possibility in the communal courtyard at the end; a common ground for co-existence and solidarity when residents are finally given freedom for creation; and a public space, increasingly rare in this city, open and vulnerable into which all can walk.

Reviews

Knowing the previous work of its creators, I believe this project will achieve something very significant for the times we are living in. It will remind us - and how appropriate this is for the medium of film - that, both politically and humanly, the past is not behind us, not obsolescent, but beside us and urgent, John Berger, 2015.

Poignant, and real, felt and important... a paean to survival, dignity, solidarity and community in the face of their erosion; political in a quiet but most urgent way, and personal, Uriel Orlow, 2015.