The View From Our House

A woman, unseen in the film, witnesses the ordinary oppression and fear of the early Nazi era. She describes the sound of screaming she regularly hears on passing a military barracks at the end of her street. Images of the barracks recur throughout the film, suggesting the routine tyranny that precipitates the woman's increasing fear and eventual journey into exile.
The film's structure of repetition and retelling foregrounds the way her life is stunted by marginalisation and terror. "I'm only just eighteen but sometimes I already feel so old that I think of dying," she writes to her would-be lover.
The film is based in part on the memories and notebooks of a young photographer who lived in Berlin. Aspects of her life are interpreted and mapped out within a small area of Berlin through a succession of haunted images and sounds that imbue place with a sense of memory and history.