The Brick House

In the Netherlands, in a cramped flat, two friends recall their memories of Tanzania, their childhood, and the windowless house in which one of them grew up.

In a small flat in the Netherlands, two friends recall patchy memories of their childhood in Africa. “Your photo, there, are those your parents? You’re lucky to have kept it. – It was taken in 1965…” Based on her discussions with Hija and Sapa, the filmmaker organises a re-enactment in which their intimacy is preserved as she does not speak their language (Swahili), thus sweeping away the banality of everyday life to create an emotional space where memory unfolds. The noise of the wind, the tassels of a chandelier and the swaying drops of a double curtain, the steam rising from the hot cloths that the two men use to wipe their face… The tiny details gradually connect Hija’s flat and its limited perspective to one of these memories charged with insidious violence: the brick house “where my mother had decided that the windows also had to be brick”. The whole rhythm of The Brick House relies on a toing and froing between the opening of a fragile memory that unfolds in stories and the spatial closure of the house in the title: the oxymoron of a suffocating home, of a house turned tomb. (Charlotte Garson)