outside

Homeless people are everywhere. But they are invisible. Losers. Failed, dirty, drunk. They live in the street and don’t own a thing and have nothing to show. Nothing that would be familiar to us, nothing that would express their personality apart from what their body carries. That’s the common image. People we would like to ignore, rather than acknowledge them as fellow human beings. That is the starting point for our film that will show a different side of these people. It portraits four men, Matze, Elvis, Peter and Sergio, as people with a personality and as survival specialists. It would be hard for anyone to match their skills in terms of surviving and organizing, their knowledge of what life actually means.
To hear their personal stories, we followed a certain strategy: we focussed on their personal belongings, which they carried around with them. We are asking them to allow us to have a look at what is in their plastic bags, their trolleys and boxes as if we were entering an unknown home. With their stories, they shared their inner world with us as well as the world they had left behind. The objects that we discovered were loaded with information, meaning, memories and emotions – simply because there are so few of them. They are fragments of lives lived. In personal conversations, the wealth of these experience is shared. We were able to discover the individual, we touched and were touched. But the film does more than observing and listening. We wanted to achieve more than making these lives visible. We wanted to shine a different light on our protagonists – at lease for one night. During one night, we staged them and their objects at their nocturnal shelters. We will present them like on a stage in a theatre or in an exhibition in a museum. For one night they shine. OUTSIDE will be more than just a documentary feature. Apart from the usual exploitation it will be presented in the context of museum, galleries, the web and everyday places.… >>>