We Used to Own Houses

Mud Crab (MIFF 2022) director David Robinson-Smith returns with a stirring cine-poem about the rental crisis, starring Thom Green (Of an Age, MIFF Premiere Fund 2022).

A landlord is confronted by one of the many tenants (Green) he has evicted, who forces him to read out a verse – repurposed from lyrics taken from the album Hostile Architecture by Ashenspire – about power, greed and culpability. Surreal vignettes depict the winners and losers of a rapacious property market, revealing the human cost of exploiting basic needs to maximise private wealth.