Estate, a Reverie

'Estate, a Reverie' tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate (1936-2014) 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.

Filmmaker's statement:
As someone who has spent the vast majority of their life living on large public housing estates, both in Munich and then in London, it was incredibly important to me that the film I was making was not about the community it depicts, but made from within it.

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 / residents to become marginalized and increasingly overlooked and ignored by the wider political and social realm.

Over the concentrated duration of making (seven years), various formal filmmaking strategies were deployed. These included long-term observational documentary, dramatic enactment, role play (both historical and contemporary) and interventions in public space and with a wider public. This hybrid aspect of the film developed not out of a desire to be aesthetically “avant-garde” but rather because the various devices were simply the most productive in terms of conveying both the layered aspects of the site, historically, architecturally and socially, and also the similarly textured identities the residents found themselves living within, in terms of how they were viewed by peers, social agencies, and the neighbouring public.

The film sought to give the residents a voice and a visual presence – to counter 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.

The film would have been impossible to make without the enormous commitment of the residents and many others - who gave freely of time, equipment and resources to enable the film’s production. In this way it was deeply collaborative.

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, built on the extended engagement detailed above.

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. However, it also hopes to offer a modest signpost towards a wider relevance and way of being in the city; a more inclusive and supportive form of social and personal interaction, taking place within a more porous and collectively focused urban environment.

BFI critics list of best films released on DVD in 2017
Nominated for the 2015 Grierson Award - Best Newcomer Documentary
Shortlisted for the Aesthetica Arts Prize

Timely, lyrical, made over seven years from within the Hackney housing estate featured
A utopian fever dream lived, and a community made, by those abandoned by the structures around them
A profound exploration of difference, marginalisation and resilience

See also http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/8951/ for additional information about this work.

Reviews:

Estate is a deeply moving portrait of a community struggling to survive in a boarded-up London public housing project, long slated for demolition. Multilayered and profound, Andrea Zimmerman’s film masterfully immerses us in a dreamlike lost-world of misfits, outcasts and survivors whom she films with love and aching tenderness.
Joshua Oppenheimer, Director of The Act Of Killing

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

There is a generosity of spirit at work in the film that captivates from the getgo - less a political polemic more a poetical portrait of times-fast-going. An enthralling and uplifting celebration of the resilience of humanity in flux.
Andrew Kötting