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A nearly inescapable fact of modern life is that most of us spend more time in just a few rooms in our homes than the sum of time spent anywhere else on Earth – and perhaps doubly so over the past year of pandemic-related lockdowns. And so, unsurprisingly, our spaces also tend to occupy a rather prominent place in our minds. Do they need a clean? A redecoration? To be ditched for a new arrangement altogether? And what – good, bad and ugly – do they reveal about us to visitors? Featuring clever animated sequences in which talking, shifting shapes transform along to the reflective words of interviewees, Rooms explores how the mental and physical spaces of our rooms intersect and overlap.
Director: Rohan Patrick McDonald
Website: Shelf Shelf
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Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
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Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
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Home
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
8 minutes
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Family life
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
21 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes