The housing crisis is never far from the headlines in Ireland. It’s always worth remembering that it’s not just a political football, kicked backwards and forwards by our landlord leaders while they profit and profilgate. The housing crisis has ruined and cost far too many lives in Dublin and beyond, and a new short from filmmaker Eamonn Dillon highlights the depths of the difficulty people face under Ireland’s high risk of homelessness. Home Truths features hard-hitting real life interviews with victims of Dublin’s rental system and depicts the stark reality of the housing crisis in Ireland.
Eamonn Dillon first witnessed the seriousness of the Dublin housing shortage while volunteering with Apollo House in 2017. During this time he made the short film Miss Apollo about a young homeless woman pursuing a career in modelling.
Dillon soon found himself stuck in the rental trap having been evicted unfairly twice and then forced to move house numerous times over the course of a couple of years. The uncertainty and constant moving eventually took its toll on Dillon’s mental health causing him extreme anxiety.
While volunteering with the Dublin Central Housing Action, Dillon contributed his story to a Facebook group called Home Truths, which collected interviews with people who had been severely affected by the housing situation in Dublin and throughout Ireland.
Describing his experience, Dillon said:
“Even though I’d had a miserable time when renting in Dublin, when I read some of the other stories, my own seemed almost quaint by comparison”
The harrowing experiences of the other contributors inspired Dillon to make his short film Home Truths. The film provides a compilation of these true stories set against a strikingly bleak backdrop of Dublin’s streets and properties shot in arresting black and white.
The result is a grim depiction of the country’s housing crisis. By sharing these real stories, Dillon is giving a voice to the thousands of other victims exploited by Ireland’s dysfunctional housing system. The film is also an attempt to enlighten those in middle Ireland who are lucky enough to have afforded their own homes and are oblivious to the extent of the problem.
Describing the crisis, Dillon has said:
“The housing situation in Dublin is so bad that it’s become like a kind of Stockholm Syndrome – people are now so used to being abused that they forget that it’s not normal – I worked in an English language school where all of my students lived in what were basically slums (I knew of one house where 42 Brazilians lived in 7 rooms, with the rent on the house being 17,000 Euros a month) and they were all in awe of the fact that I had my own room even though I was a 30-year-old adult with a full-time job”
In describing his work, Eamonn says he is fascinated “with meaning and what people truly want from their lives, an ever more relevant issue in an age when so many people are questioning society’s long-held values”.
As well as Miss Apollo and Home Truths, Dillon has also made another short called Joe Odiboh: Release– a biographical portrait of a Nigerian artist and his efforts to maintain his humanity within Ireland’s Direct Provision refugee processing system. A clip of this film will be featured as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Maternal Gaze Exhibition.
A trailer for Home Truths is available now and you can watch the full 11 minute short itself on Youtube HERE.