Anthea Kennedy, Ian Wiblin I 2013 | UK I 76 min | Digital

A woman witnesses the ordinary oppression and fear of the early years of National Socialism. She describes the sounds she regularly hears on passing a military barracks whilst walking from her house to the station. Images of the barracks recur throughout the film, suggesting the routine tyranny that precipitates the woman’s increasing fear and eventual journey into exile in London. The film’s structure of repetition and retelling foregrounds the way in which her life is stunted by increasing marginalisation and terror. “I’m only just eighteen but sometimes I already feel so old that I think of dying,” she writes in a letter to her would-be lover. The View from Our House is based in part on the memories, unsent letters and notebooks of a young photographer who lived in Berlin-Tempelhof. Aspects of her life are mapped out within this small area of Berlin through a succession of haunted images and sounds that imbue place with a sense of memory and history.

The View from Our House is the first in a loose trilogy of films focused on different members of the same family during the early years of the Nazi regime. The two other films in the trilogy, Four Parts of a Folding Screen (2018) and Alarm Notes (2025) will screen at Close-Up Cinema on Wednesday 13 May and Sunday 17 May.

The screening of The View from Our House will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.