How Now, House? Wins Clermont Auvergne University Prize

We have previously covered the short film How Now, House?, directed by acclaimed animator and filmmaker Tess Martin, and its tour around festivals. Now, after a successful year of festival screenings around the world, the film has been awarded the Clermont Auvergne University Prize at the recent Videoformes Hybrid and Digital Arts Festival in Clermont-Ferrand in France.

How Now, House? is a 13-minute film that explores time, memory and the impermanence of home through a deeply personal lens. Inspired by Martin's leaving of a home she had lived in for 10 years- the longest period she had lived anywhere, the film reflects on the global housing crisis and our collective sense of precarity. 

Using a mix of time-lapse photography, rotoscoping, photo replacement, repetitive actions and the symbolic placement of playing cards, the film evokes multiple time periods at once. The playing cards serve as a stand-in for time, shuffling through past and present in a never-ending game. A multi-language voice over, blending real historical documentation with reflections on time, invites viewers to consider the imprints we leave on spaces and the fleeting nature of permanence.

“I wanted to explore how our time in a shared space connects us to the past and to those who came before us,” said Tess Martin. As part of the film's development, Martin extensively researched the history of the building and its past residents and was able to incorporate them into the film. 

The Student Jury commented, "[How Now, House?] highlights different life trajectories, spanning diverse cultures and eras, all brought together in a single place—a house in Rotterdam. The video juxtaposes multicoloured silhouettes performing everyday tasks such as watering plants, cleaning, or tinkering.

These gestures, which seem familiar to us, interact with the more poignant stories of the house’s former occupants. You’ll find testimonies about experiences during lockdown and World War II, interwoven with stories of discrimination, neighbourly relations, family, and shared living.

The technique then illustrates this theme. Different silhouettes blend into one another. These special effects are achieved by modifying the frames one by one, using the principle of rotoscoping.

This house thus appears as a guardian of the memories of all its residents. A theory of time is then developed, that of physicist Carlo Rovelli. According to him, the universe might resemble a vast mosaic of events where each moment exists primarily through its relationship with the others. It is therefore not a straight line leading from the past to the future, but a multitude of moments that echo one another.

You may also notice these small details while watching, such as the layers of overlapping wallpaper, or the new hardwood floor covering the old 1970s carpet.

The strength of this short film lies in the fact that, beyond a personal appropriation of a place through its decoration and the time spent within it we realise that it is more of a place of memory that brings together various realities, not just our own. We inhabit a place without completely erasing those who occupied it in the past, and it is essential to shed light on this “before,” so as not to forget, so as not to erase life stories that were sometimes difficult, which some would like to consign to silence."