Home (2026)

Brianna Lee has been incredibly busy lately. Her feature The Troll premiered at Raindance this year and her short The Camper is playing the horror circuit, and she does very nearly every job on her films herself. Home is something else entirely. It is an eight-minute short, having had its World Premiere in June at the Sea Cliff Film Festival and screening this Saturday July 18th at the Bergenfield Film Festival, and it trades the scares for something quieter and far more personal. It is a film about the place she comes from, and about who she has lost.

There is almost no plot to speak of, but it does not need one. Lee walks the streets of her hometown, looking through old shop windows, resting a hand on door handles and street corners, taking in the sights, the sounds, the smells and, above all, the memories that a hometown holds in its every ordinary surface. For its first stretch it is a gentle, sensory piece about the way a place can quietly hold a whole life.

And then it becomes about loss. Home reveals itself as a tribute to a loved one Brianna has lost, and as a meditation on how the people who are gone are never truly gone from the places you shared with them. She finds them everywhere in these streets, in the corners and the windows and the light, and the film's quiet argument is that grief and presence can live in the same breath. It is tender, unforced and deeply felt.

I will be honest about why this one landed the way it did for me. I lost my father six years ago, and in many ways that pain still feels as raw as it did on the first day. But I still walk the same streets he did, I still sit in the same cafes, and I still carry his nickname, Macca. Watching Home, I recognised all of it: the way a hometown becomes a kind of keeping place, and the strange comfort of feeling someone close by in the very spot where they used to be. Brianna has put that feeling on screen with real grace, and she has done it without a single false or sentimental note.

Home is a brilliant, touching little film, and for anyone who has known that particular kind of loss it will reach somewhere deep. It is a world away from Brianna Lee's other work, and it reveals a filmmaker with far more than one register to her. Four stars from me, and a reminder that sometimes the most affecting thing a camera can do is simply walk a familiar street and remember.

Reviewed from a screener provided by the director ahead of the film's premiere at the Bergenfield Film Festival, New Jersey, on 18 July 2026.

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