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Whether it’s been you, a parent, grandparent, or other close family member, most people in Canada have experienced downsizing — the act of getting rid of some belongings to save space, and often move to a smaller home as a person ages.
Premiering Sunday, March 8 at 9 PM on CBC Docs POV, documentary film The Art of Downsizing details the experience of three Toronto-based individuals and their families, who must downsize their belongings — whether in preparation for a move from a house to a condo, or to remove obstacles as they age in place.
“We’re really experiencing a unique moment in time,” The Art of Downsizing director Geeta Sondhi told us. “We’ve reached a demographic tipping point — for the first time in history we have more seniors than younger people, and it’s also happening at the same time as a real estate boom, and a housing crisis. I think this perfect storm makes this an urgent topic to delve into.”
Focusing in on individual Canadian stories, the documentary explores how a lifetime of possessions define us and how we make a clean break from those chains. “This topic seems really innocuous, that it’s merely about downsizing your possessions,” adds Geeta. “However, the implications of rearranging your living space so that you can age well, are actually enormous, so we examine how some people experience these changes.”
The Art of Downsizing also explores the difficulty in downsizing from a detached house to a smaller, Toronto-sized condo, where there simply isn’t the space to hang on to decades worth of accumulation.
“We’re an entire country experiencing this,” says Geeta. “In the film, you see people from all walks of life working through downsizing, and no one is in a better position to deal with it. I hope we can start to think about legacy, and about “right sizing” instead of downsizing, because the focus is so much more positive and about the future.”
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