« Home » is an ambiguous reality for Marcus, whose lifelines are slowly corroding, caught in-between the fleeting memories of his native Hong Kong and the harsh reality of his Canadian foothold. A recent film school graduate, he struggles to find work in the city, paralyzed by the forthcoming expiration of his student visa and the painful longing for his London-bound girlfriend. Alex Lo’s autobiographical first feature frames its protagonist’s journey as a bittersweet chronicle laced with deadpan humour, shot in melancholy black and white. An ingenious foray into the meanders and vagaries of pendency.

Hanna is a real-estate photographer from Mississauga who commutes daily to Toronto to snap pictures of luxury apartments for a network of shady, elusive corporations. With his debut feature, director Christopher Beaulieu provides illuminating insight into the notion of liminality and the economic dispossession of younger generations. Favoring a detached approach, where the warmth of his celluloid images clashes with the cold functionality of Hanna’s digital photographs, where the nostalgia of past prosperity seamlessly seeps into the film material, Otium shows a rare kind of lucidity. Probing the spacious depths of empty dwellings, it tells of the contemporary Tantaluses of Hanna’s generation, for whom the gig economy provides dreams of wealth that it will make sure to keep unfulfilled.