(2020, Germany)

“Poems are made by fools like me

/ But only God can make a tree.”

Joyce Kilmer, Trees

Angela Schanelec’s newest project is less a film than a long, drawn-out sigh. There is a hesitance that is deafening, as if we are anticipating what might arrive after the ellipses in her title, only to realize that there is nothing there—only eternal longing.

Schanelec, once a theater actress, makes a movie as if conducting a dinner party—choreographed poetics. She uses her own friends, family, and personal spaces in her films, and it often seems she is either meticulously directing each movement or it is all improvised. I Was Home, But… has a similar feeling of familiarity, but presents itself almost as a ghost story: people appear once, some disappear, families are presented, are strangers even to each other. It begins with the emergence of a thirteen-year-old boy, damp with soiled clothes, broken toe on one foot. He gives no information about his prior whereabouts, not even to his relatives. Nothing more is learned, with most of the movie focused on his young widowed mother, who has the gait of someone decades older. The film is punctuated with snippets of an elementary class, where different children are introduced each time, all performing scenes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The pacing of the film is austere and elliptical, but it’s almost never overtly cinematic, vying instead for that pristine and composed moment just before a photograph is captured.

I Was Home, But… is also uniquely spiritual, bookmarked by two long shots of animals. There is a wild dog chasing a rabbit, and a donkey in the background. By the end, the rabbit is caught and devoured; the dog and donkey are asleep; and the boy and his sister walk, piggy-backed, deeper into a lake. What ties each of these together we might never know—with Schanelec, conclusions are forever forthcoming. In I Was Home, But… Schanelec leaves this question open to the young children, all of whom she describes as “somewhere between being and becoming.” She tasks them with finding answers, even if those answers are only ever new questions. Thus, it feels the only fitting way to conclude from a film like I Was Home, But…is not to.