What is the plot of „Chasing Houses“?

Chasing Houses is a road movie featuring a house, traveling across the American West on Route 66 to Monument Valley – with unusual companions. The movie presents a snapshot of contemporary life in America as exemplified by pre-fabricated mobile homes and trailers: between domesticity and infinite expanse, freedom and precarious lives. We see different fates and life plans unfold; we meet the people who live in these houses, the ones who transport them and those who sell them. They describe their hopes and dreams as well as the struggles they are facing.

Chasing Houses is less about a sequence of events as than about the description of a mindset, an attitude to life connected to the landscape as well as economic backgrounds.

When was the movie made?

From idea to financing, from shooting to post-production, I have spent four years making this movie. After filming, the material was stuck in a drawer, because I did not have the necessary distance to turn an incredibly intense journey into a movie. It was also my first feature. Then, we ran out of money and I had to deal with financing again. I had a comparatively tiny budget, which slowed down the process considerably. And I did most of the work by myself, without the help of a production company. As a result, I learned a lot about film production, but next time, I would prefer to delegate some of these tasks. But I had amazing support, a great team and a fantastic editor.

You researched the genre of the American road movie in great detail. What purpose does it serve in your opinion and why did you want to explore it

Road movies negotiate a space between independence and settledness. For the most part, they are dealing with notion of manliness and a quest for freedom. There is something to discover and something to run away from. There is movement and a landscape to traverse. Chasing Houses delivers on some of the characteristics of the genre and challenges others. There is landscape, movement and freedom – but also domesticity and big, bulky thing, which are traveling. Ever since I saw a house on the highway for the very first time, I had wanted to make this movie.

I was fascinated by the contradictions in this picture. It represents a desire for freedom and independence, as well as difficult living conditions caused by die-hard capitalism and a social system, which has become more and more fragile. What image could better typify an attitude of „going further“ and „going bigger“ along with a flexibility that borders on self-sacrifice than a house that is on the move? Road movies are quoted several times Chasing Houses. There are allusions to Easy Rider (we took the same route and used the sound track in the opening scene), westerns and other road movies. Monument Valley is an iconic location. But I have never seen people living there in any of these films. In Chasing Houses, I wanted to show the things that are taking place behind the camera in most films, on the margins of the hero’s narrative.

Do you regard this film as a statement on the political climate in the United States?

Definitely. I give room to contrasting positions, to people who do not usually get a chance to speak, the situation of the Navajo on whose reservation Monument Valley is located. There is no express political statement by ways of a voice-over commentary. Instead, the film is an invitation to watch, take note and form an opinion. Economic differences are evident, the belief in progress is deteriorating, in the same way as the mobile homes themselves are disposable: Instant Living, but only for a short time. The American Dream has become unstable.

In what way did your stay at Villa Aurora influence this movie?

Without Villa Aurora, this film would not have turned out the way it did. The fellowship afforded me the opportunity to delve into the topic. I was not able to do much research in Germany. There is not a lot of literature on mobile homes. And I hardly got any answers to online requests for information. It was only once I arrived at the Villa, that I could really get started. I also realized how many mobile home parks there are in Los Angeles. While staying at the Villa, I was able to get in contact with various mobile home parks and started shooting at a factory. After that, I followed the transport of a house through Southern California for the first time. The three-month residency was the foundation fort he film. Afterwards, the cinematographer and I traveled the country for six more weeks. Our quarters were not as magnificent as before; we mainly stayed in a tent in the desert...the film turned out as rich in contrast as our stay!