Norwegian director, Signe Rosenlund-Hauglid’s creatively expressive short film, A Home on Every Floor, is inescapably nostalgic. Yet beneath the wistful memories of its real-life character, Norwegian-Eritrean social geographer, activist and poet Hanna Asefaw, lies an ominous commentary about gentrification and economic inequality.

Based on Asefaw’s poem Sannergata 32, her spoken word performance in the short film is merged with her childhood home reimagined in miniature form. Growing up in Oslo in the 1990s, in one of three public housing apartment blocks, Asefaw describes belonging to a village with a home on every floor. Two floors below lived her best-friend Anine. The pair were inseparable until Asefaw’s family moved when she was five-years-old.

It’s misleading to describe A Home on Every Floor in the context of a story. Yes, it’s a story borne out of a poem, but Asefaw’s memories and reflections, her formative experience of community, and how these things came to be lost or broken define it as a narrative memory. Rosenlund-Hauglid and Asefaw create a series of meeting points around the reliability of memory, innocence and darkness, connection and disconnection.

A Home on Every Floor leaps off the screen, seducing us with its aesthetic and narrative charm. In her director’s statement, Rosenlund-Hauglid says the film enters a child’s perspective, but this is an oversimplification of the story’s nuance. Instead of placing the audience inside a child’s perspective, Asefaw appropriates her younger self’s point of view. The unreliability of memory means Asefaw’s narration is a mix of truth and the impression of what she remembers.

By giving the Eritrean experience a voice that criticises housing privatisation, A Home on Every Floor is a political film. Brimming with Asefaw’s confident spoken performance and Rosenlund-Hauglid’s captivating aesthetic approach, the film hits a raw nerve that will resonate not only with the Norwegian audience. Out of the memories of childhood, the bottomless bags of candy, playing with your friends every day and the sense of belonging, A Home on Every Floor pivots to a less innocent reality. The apartment buildings that were home to Asefaw’s nostalgic memories had economical value. The basic necessity of four walls, a floor and a ceiling were monetised with indifference and communicates how society is yet to fully shed its Darwinian skin, where survival and worth is measured in wealth.

Asefaw’s childhood home of 155 apartments was bought by the wealthy business person, Ovar Tollefsen, who turned them into private rental spaces. Asefaw admits that he might not be a bad person, but questions the morality behind “renovating minimally and raising the rents maximally” to “replace my friends with someone richer, and steal my first home”. There’s anger in her words, but it’s offset by her honest criticism. Gentrification disenfranchises individuals, creates a class system and nurtures economic inequality.

Rosenlund-Hauglid meticulously merges light and darkness, offsetting the aforementioned innocent childhood memories of bags of candy and playtime with needle pricks, departures and lost friendships, that engages a bigger theme. It provides the film with a seductive, yet contentious energy, while Asefaw’s inclusion in the frame alongside the miniatures is equally captivating. Sometimes she’s an abstract, partially visible figure, other times she’s unseen and only heard, guiding us through her personal memories. Asefaw’s tone adjusts as she recollects a soothing, upset or angry narration that even becomes impassioned protestation. What makes A Home on Every Floor entrancing is the dreamlike aesthetic, turning memories into a physical space she’s inside – part of the dream and also the dreamer.

A Home on Every Floor showed Hot Docs, and also at DOC NYC.