Worlds Unknown
World of Our Own, Shelter’s disarming depiction of a young girl’s tender imagination, soberly marooned in a stricken family home, stands out from a Not-for-Profit sector that consistently swings for the story fences.
Perhaps it is this morning, you’re reading while hopping barefoot between the cold kitchen tiles, waiting on the stove to do its damn thing and draw your coffee to a satisfying gurgle. When it’s ready, you’ll decant the liquid gold into that most favourite of flasks, the one you’re currently hunting for. Where IS it anyway? You have others, sure, but it must be that one. You’re not so childish as to start the day on such wrong footing.
Or it’s possible you’ll choose to work from home today, acting as captain and paymaster of your own good-ship-labour. Maybe it’s later, and you’ve already returned having blazed an unusually efficient trail through throngs of fellow nine-to-fivers, all making similar return pilgrimages. You made good time, you tell yourself you’ve earned that slow slide down into your preferred slouching spot, the place where comfort comes from. I am sure you do deserve it.
Whether a battered but beloved thermos, cosy cubby hole, or the free-range nature of our domestic feng shui, there can be no doubt that home comforts matter to us. They bring about a certain, slow releasing determination which sustains throughout the day. But what are we to do when there is little of that most excellent stuff to go on? What nurtures us when we inadvertently lose control of the boat’s tiller? What, I wonder, if you are only a child? With a scant runtime of one minute, Shelter skilfully pins some big questions to the mast.
Understandably, the Not-for-Profit sector isn’t known for its easy access to lavish marketing budgets, but this has become a narrative superpower. Smaller pots of production cash to tap in to - smaller than those enjoyed by other nameless sectors, anyway – mean creativity must bear the extra load. Ideas are more well thought out and absolute. The question becomes: how do we communicate our message with less time, production heft, money…? You rely on premise and connection, that’s how.
In World of Our Own, the pressure of losing the family home is beginning to cause familial buckling, while little Mia conjures up a world of familiar sci-fi non-sense to escape the unrecognisable reality around her. But the comings and goings of fictional figments are staggered by outside interruptions, itself a powerful commentary on the impact that a disjointed childhood can have in later life. There is production value here too which undoubtedly shortened duration even further, but while we often err on the side of ‘less dazzle more story’ seeing Mia’s imagination writ large is worth it. I too am upset when I’m pulled back to the here and now.
Shelter is very good at pairing double messaging with emotion like this, and audience mobilisation figures confirm it: on Instagram, this piece generated audience engagement nearly 7X that of the wider sector, while on LinkedIn it was a little over 6X. Staggering, but Shelter have to be. The UK is the 6th largest economy on the face of the planet, yet on an infamous night in 2024, nearly 400,000 people in Britain were homeless. That’s about 1 in every 160 of us. Though, unbelievably, this number is likely an underestimate since it says nothing of unclassified homelessness like sofa surfing.
Creature comforts tend to follow us out of the door each morning, and as such, they are significant, just as focused (we don’t like the word ‘smaller’) films like this one matter in a much grander societal scope. World of Our Own reminds us how easy it is to take all of our small things for granted, forcing us to reconcile with the legacy of destitution that will be left for the children of tomorrow overlooked today. Most importantly, Shelter bookmark our creativity and vision as resources to be protected, whatever the age.
With more messaging like that in wider communications, we might all have a small space to call our own one day. Imagine that.
