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 an illuminating insight into the notion of liminality and the economic dispossession of younger generations. Favouring 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.
