HÄUSER JAGEN – CHASING HOUSES
Justin Time | USA, Germany 2017 | 60 Min. | OmeU
The experimental road movie enters the contradictory space between home and mobility. Through the vastness of the US American West, CHASING HOUSES follows mobile homes on their journey from tear down to set up. A multitude of lifestyles and economic disparities unfolds in the fragmented encounters along the road: A real estate agent recounts her days as a Las Vegas showgirl, a haulier and Tea Party supporter explains capitalism, a desert recluse prefers his trailer to life in the city, and snowbird tourists take an extended vacation. Against the movie-like backdrop of Monument Valley, a Native American couple describes real-life conditions on the reservation. Chasing Houses is a searching journey, an approach to a social fabric and to a mindset in all its ambivalence. It delivers on some of the characteristics of the road movie genre and challenges others. There is landscape, movement and freedom – but also domesticity and big, bulky things that go traveling. The film looks at the things that are taking place on the margins of the hero’s narrative. Chasing Houses makes palpable the charged relationships between hopes and dead-end prospects, and opens up questions of home, belonging, and the actuality of the American Dream.
