Estate is a deeply moving portrait of a community struggling to survive in a boarded-up London public housing project, an utopian promise of social housing, long slated for demolition. Multilayered and profound, Andrea Zimmerman’s film masterfully immerses us in a dreamlike lost-world of misfits, outcasts and survivors whom she films with love and aching tenderness. Her groundbreaking approach to cinema – at once collaborative and performative – creates a work of rare intimacy, a lyrical and gripping vision of the loneliness and disempowerment that haunts life even in the world’s wealthiest cities. Filmed over seven years, the film reveals and celebrates the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents’ own historical re-enactments, landscape and architectural studies and dramatised scenes, Estate asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography… A spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity.
