The Home that is Me: A War Drama on the Optimism and Desolation in Self-Reliance

Araik Zulalyn’s The Home that is Me is a 6-minute claymation drama about a world mutilated and mutated by war. The central storyline takes out the many agonised steps in between and simplifies the equation within: Flies equal death, do everything to outrun them. It becomes the protagonist’s sole purpose. Not building a life, but avoiding death. 

He is a young, solitary man, still optimistic and relatively light, but obviously part of a devastated world. He needs, almost all he needs for the moment, is a small, stable patch of land on which to build a hut. He needs the hut as soon as possible; the film makes clear what happens to the unshielded in this world.   

In fact, the distinction that the film makes—outrunning, rather than keeping the flies away—is significant. Starvation, cold, illness, and then literal predators: how long, in conditions of war, can you keep them away, i.e., have some kind of an upper hand or solid ground, before you are forced to do everything you can to make yourself just out of reach of their chase of you?

The imagery, both clay and live-action, is viscerally affecting. In fact, the heart—the target of the flies—is not even behind the ribcage anymore. It’s out in the open and utterly vulnerable to the death and decay that flies bring and maggots feast on. 

The surrounding environment does its own talking independent of the immediate concerns of the young man (though he can never be counted as separate from it, especially not when the search for safe ground is his chief concern). Everything is touched by destruction, and what existed once as an ecosystem is now scrambling to find balance in the face of what is essentially zombiefication. 

Along with the imagery, what is not shown is just as important, if not more. Offscreen sound relays offscreen movement, which—in an animation film that, though gruesome, still utilises metaphor—asks us to remember what we have already seen of war, military violence on civilians, and the destruction left in their wake. 

The Home that is Me favours refuge in the last asylum available to someone who has been stripped of everything else: the self. The thesis is potentially as empowering as it is depressing, a fitting conclusion to arrive at when the backdrop is the ravaging hands of annihilation. 

Watch The Home that is Me Short Film Trailer