CriterionChannel Feature：Close to Home

Countless filmmakers have turned to their everyday lives for inspiration, but a few directors take it even further: shooting on location in their very own living spaces. Recent global circumstances may have conspired to make a fad of this eccentric approach to moviemaking, but it’s nothing new. From cinema’s earliest days, filmmakers have shot close to home—capturing their babies at the dining table or their partners in the garden—out of economic necessity, the desire to make something more immediately personal, or simply because their outsider visions were too weird to be realized anywhere else. This series offers a diverse array of examples of this endlessly fascinating subgenre, exploring how shooting at home can affect everything from performance to composition to mood, creating new cinematic spaces where personal truths and imaginative fictions mingle in an often uneasy coexistence. Seen together, they offer a very different notion of what constitutes a “home movie.”