Steel Homes

Above: Still from "Steel Homes" by Eva Weber

This short documentary is really interesting and gripped me from the beginning. It’s subject matter is a storage facility but oddly it makes this very human and personal. You would think with it’s vast amount of steel empty corridors that you couldn’t put a voice on a place like that but the film reveals the lives of those who use them, explores the reasons people ‘horde’ and the struggles they go through about what to keep and why they keep them. Even in the title the word ‘homes’ instead of ‘houses’ connotes that the director wants to show the lives hidden behind the doors and not just the objects. I think that it successfully does this by bringing life to a lifeless place through narration of the memories, situations and struggles of those who use the spaces and the objects that are put in them.

The director, in showing the empty corridors and the endless doors, is trying to get across how many people are linked by storage units yet no-one knows what’s behind the doors or who the people are that use them and why they use them as the place is very impersonal and segregated. This impersonal space is created right from the first mechanical sounds of the lift and then the empty corridors with rows of doors. The narration is the important element as it introduces the subject matter and is the main injection of lives into the piece.

Something I particularly liked was that throughout the film, you never see inside the storage spaces fully. You may see a small section but it reinforces that you will never fully know the “stories behind the doors”.

I found that the narrators in the piece were the focal point and I think there was just enough of each story to slowly unravel what we are looking into and tied the film together nicely. The fact that there are several narrators and each is interspersed with others really helps to create the sense of many storage users in a small space but not knowing each others stories.

Overall, I liked it - it was thought provoking and I felt that the snippets of peoples opinions and stories were intriguing. I wanted to know more about the back stories and what the objects they were discussing were. Cleverly, the juxtaposition of glimpses into the lives with the shots of steel doors brought into sharp focus the directors aims.

I think it is successful in dealing with it’s subject because I was completely absorbed throughout and wanted to know the full stories. It felt as though the narrators were talking simply to me and the images were mostly long shots and mid shots which fitted nicely with the themes of the piece.