“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back,” wrote James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room. The films here deal with this vital and fragile notion of belonging to somewhere. A family, a country, a safe space you can find in the smallest details (a reassuring hue, like in the melodrama The Color of the Room), or unlikely setting (a goal where a football player can daydream, like in the colourful Now. Here). 

Homes can seem too familiar, limited, and precarious for the characters of After Dawn and Modern Speed, but they can still provide poignant surprises for people in search for themselves. In The Bath, summer holidays are an all-too brief respite, a temporary shelter before growing up, even in the ugliest of places. 

And finally, with its vivid depiction of the deportation of Baltic people in the 1940s, Purga echoes the everlasting plight of displaced and exiled persons in the world, then and now.

Foreword by the programme curator: Films about finding a home, in ageographical or subjective sense — and the beauty and fragility of it all.