How To Be At Home
2020 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Andrea Dorfman
Genres: animation, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Poet Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman reunite for an animated meditation on loneliness and finding connection while alone.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A poet and animator making a 4-minute essay about loneliness together sounds like the setup for something insufferably sincere, but Dorfman's actual move—pairing Davis's voice with animated restraint instead of adorning it—is genuinely weird and it works.
The Dorfman-Davis collaboration sits squarely in the essay-film tradition, where voice and image negotiate meaning rather than illustrate it; the formal discipline here—what *not* to animate—reveals a curatorial intelligence about the essay form itself.
The decision to let Tanya Davis's voice carry the emotional weight while animation stays deliberately minimal and abstract is the entire film, and it's the kind of choice that makes you understand why restraint, not budget, is what separates a sketch from something unforgettable.