They’re clinging, as though shipwrecked, to the walls of a house. This is being played out in certain neighbourhoods where a dwelling is the only thing people possess. For over twenty years in Bari no new social housing has been assigned and three thousand families are on the waiting list. Inevitably, a silent war among paupers has broken out, a war in which squatters lay siege to the lodgings of anyone careless enough to leave home for a few hours too many, whether to visit a relative or to keep a hospital appointment. The squatters mainly target the houses of old or single people. They stake their claim on the basis that they are large families and it is difficult to make them leave. The film relates the stories of four people whose every move or initiative is dictated by the fear of losing their house. They are constantly looking for survival strategies. Though they are in legitimate possession of their homes, in practice it is their homes which possess them. The home as a prison is the metaphor which runs parallel to the everyday ambition to have “a roof over one’s head”. “Housing” reveals the crazy, grotesque ordeal of the daily obsession with housing problems. DIRECTOR’S NOTE OF INTENT Living for a home, and yet not living in a home. The characters in our story revolve around this painful, paradoxical mantra, while the camera accompanies them, slipping with them into every corner, waiting, alongside them, for the news of a change in fortune which never comes. With the outer shell created by this first obsession peeled away, the film seeks the limits of an intimacy, the silent driftings of enforced solitude, as it discovers resources of imagination which are now tragicomic, now worrying. Maintaining a distance from outright social commentary, the film’s sights remain fixed upon what remains: the seemingly insignificant revelations of vulnerability in which everyone can recognise himself; on the unexpected twists of vitality which leave us to guess at the many other needs which are obscured by the aspiration to a fixed home.