Paper short abstract:

Madrid, México, Montevideo: the most important events in our cities are happening at home. In this visual ethnography on contemporary living, twenty dwellers introduce us to the spaces they live in, the stuff they love and other little things that give meaning to ordinary life.

Paper long abstract:

Daniell thought he was going to have "a wife, three kids and all that", but his life did not went this way. Together with other voices, he pauses to reflect upon apparent trifles. The silent company of objects. Loneliness. Order and disorder. The image of ourselves, reflected in mirrors. The challenge to become oneself. The place for children. Travels and moves with no way back. The family legacy, that falls down on you as an unexpected burden.

In every one of these micro-stories the whole life of those doing the storytelling can be glanced. Ours is then both an exploration on singular, concrete intimacies, as well as a collective, choral discourse on the depth and beauties of the everyday (or, in the wording by George Perec, the daily making of "the infraordinary").

The movie results in an essay on the classic Urban Symphony genre. As a counterpoint of its best tokens (such as Berlin 1900, Amsterdam Global Village or Shortcuts, our modest aim has been instead to tell from the inside how do we live. To compose a kind of indoor urban symphony.

This is so because cities have been narrated from manifold perspectives, but scarcely from the inside. Urban poetics emerges, then, in a different tone. The big city does not appear as anonymous locus of commodities, industry and mass human relations. It is also ground for personal assertion, quest, surprise, self-discovering. Something attractive and enigmatic emerges at our homes: an order of our own. A universe.