(31 min., 2021)
When a homeowners insurance claimant experiences the total loss of a home, insurance companies often require a comprehensive contents inventory to be prepared—a spreadsheet listing every single object that was in the destroyed home. Filmed in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California during the nine months following the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire that destroyed over 900 area homes, filmmaker Irene Lusztig invites her own neighbors to share objects lost or found in the fire. Together, they co-create a different kind of “contents inventory”—a collective emotional map of what home means at a moment when the idea of home feels most fragile. Contents Inventory is a meditation on loss and the material archeology of objects; a reflection on the convergence of climate, housing, and insurance crises; and a process of bearing witness to what it feels like to lose everything in the weeks and months after news cameras stop paying attention.
World Premiere screening: IDFA 2021