The audiovisual poem How to Be Alone (2010) was a viral hit for the Canadian musician and poet Tanya Davis and the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman. Their sequel How to Be at Home updates the original for our age of COVID-19 lockdown, pairing Dorfman’s charming animations – a distinctive melding of stop-motion and illustration – with Davis’s lyrical musings on the isolation that she and much of the rest of the world has endured over the past eight months. The resulting short is an artful – and, depending on your current degree of solitude, perhaps cathartic – meditation on the many conflicting emotions inspired by being forced to spend time at home during a crisis.
‘Lean into loneliness like it is holding you’ – a poetic reflection on life in lockdown
12 November 2020
videoAddiction
After 17 years of addiction, Raina finds a lifeline in compassion
15 minutes
videoDemography and migration
The volunteers who offer a last line of care for migrants at a contentious border
30 minutes
videoConsciousness and altered states
How an artist learned to ‘co-live’ with the distressing voice in her head
6 minutes
videoLove and friendship
What does it mean to say goodbye to a creature that doesn’t know you’re leaving?
13 minutes
videoLife stages
Grief, healing and laughter coexist at a unique retreat for widows and widowers
15 minutes
videoConsciousness and altered states
What do screens depicting serene natural scenes mean to those living in lock-up?
12 minutes
videoFamily life
A mother and child bond in an unusual prison visitation space in this poignant portrait
11 minutes
videoWellbeing
Children of the Rwandan genocide face a unique stigma 30 years later
20 minutes
videoWar and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes