‘Lean into loneliness like it is holding you’ – a poetic reflection on life in lockdown
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.
video
Love and friendship
What does it mean to say goodbye to a creature that doesn’t know you’re leaving?
13 minutes
video
Life stages
Grief, healing and laughter coexist at a unique retreat for widows and widowers
15 minutes
video
Consciousness and altered states
What do screens depicting serene natural scenes mean to those living in lock-up?
12 minutes
video
Family life
A mother and child bond in an unusual prison visitation space in this poignant portrait
11 minutes
video
Wellbeing
Children of the Rwandan genocide face a unique stigma 30 years later
20 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A haunting scene from ‘Minority Report’ inspires a voyage into time and memory
7 minutes
video
Family life
The stream-of-consciousness thoughts and memories that emerge while cooking a meal
5 minutes
video
Ageing and death
We’re not the only animals that appear to grieve. What are the implications?
6 minutes