A live web documentary about At Home, a major Canadian housing project that gave homes to 1,265 homeless people.
In 2007, the United Nations reprimanded Canada because of the extremely large numbers of homeless people in the country. A year later, the government gave $110 million to At Home, a major national housing project that is nothing less than a social experiment. A total of 1,265 homeless people were allocated homes, while a control group of 970 people only had access to previously existing facilities. This made it possible to carry out research into whether homeless people – who are plagued by unemployment and often mental problems and addiction – benefit from first having a home and then getting help.
It turns current practice on its head, because usually people only get a home once other problems have been sorted out. The participants in At Home undergo intensive supervision by psychologists and social workers, and they are regularly interviewed by the researchers. And they’re also being followed by a film crew from the National Film Board of Canada. Their reportages will continue to appear on the attractively designed web platform Here at Home until 2013, when the experiment ends. To view the films, users click on colorful moons floating around five mother planets representing the participating cities of Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto and Moncton. These are combined with the collected data to create a live web documentary on this huge and ambitious housing project.
Via IDFA DocLab
