Home Plant House Movie is a short film commissioned in 2020 by The Pod’s evolving DIALOGUE programme, a mental health resource run by Coventry City Council. Using a home-movie style camcorder, the films sets out to explore the magic of living with house-plants: how they make us feel, the people and places that connect through the cultivation of them and how they make a space a home.

With a joyful original piano score by composer Adam Hibberd forming the bedding to the piece, I reached out to the community to meet with and discover the homes, feelings and methods of four passionate growers, friends known and friends new: relationships shaped in themselves by the nurturing and sharing of plants – Akeel Habib, Yara Richtiger, Lou Jerzyszek and Lisa Franklin.

The film also features 35mm film photographs from locations and businesses known for their rich displays of interior flora – The Pod Café, Garden Museum in London, The Crooked Book in Bournemouth and The Old Electric Shop in Hay-on-Wye. The film melds spoken reflections with the multi-faceted visuals of plants in the home space, stately in their character and definition – big or small – and the processes of tending to them. Ultimately, the film hopes to inspire DIALOGUE, inline with the Pod’s core values to cultivate, connect and change.

Digital .mov file, 12:23 minutes.

To mark the release, a 35mm still photograph which is included in the film has been produced as a signed and numbered limited archival print edition of 20, sized 7.5×5″. The prints are £12 each and available to buy in person at The Pod Cafe, Far Gosford Street, Coventry. All of the money goes towards the Cafe’s ‘Pay it Forward’ scheme which seeks to create healthy, exciting, sustainable, dairy-free meals for those disproportionally impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. See the image below.