Small Is Beautiful: A Tiny House Documentary (2015) watch online HD

The small house movement is intriguing and I was looking forward to seeing this documentary interview various Portland dwelling enthusiasts to learn how they got hooked on the idea of building a tiny house, and surmounted the problems with building permits etc. I assumed this would be about the tiny houses, not their tiny lives. Instead the movie tortures us with long, naval gazing tales about their inner struggle with their past, emotions, relationships with their parents, love life etc... oh, and the ONLY thing these people have in common with each other is that they live in a small house in Portland. I fell asleep twice...

This low budget wonder was beyond nauseating. I like tiny houses and would like to live in one myself. But it's people like those in this video who ruin the whole concept. Their talk of the tiny house "community" and "what it means to live in a tiny house" is arrogant as well as a bunch of B.S. This video wasn't at all about tiny house living. It was about millennials, hipsters and idealist hippies who THINK they're enlightened, wise and doing something new and innovative. But, in reality, they're just boring, unoriginal, and incredibly irritating! Especially Nikki! Nikki and Mitchell were uncomfortable and awkward to watch but Nikki was just downright annoying. If you like tiny houses, watch Tiny House Nation instead. If you like pretentious hipsters and millennials and love to be bored to death, watch this.

I decided to start watching this documentary with the intention of learning about the ins and outs of living in a tiny house. My optimism as well as my soul started to fade at around the 20 minute mark. By the 30 minute mark i had to stop. It feels like the director started with the intention of exploring tiny house living and believed they were onto a winner exploring the trials and tribulations of building a tiny house. Newsflash - building any house is arduous, tiring, and testing. No, i am not interested in how making a miniature house tests a relationship. Nor do i understand why it seems to be a prerequisite that any person wanting to live in a tiny house has to build it from scratch. The four participants come across as lazy moochers that are put off by hard work. Along with making live extra difficult for themselves. This film put me off tiny houses and i believe unfairly so.

After wasting 30 minutes of my Sunday watching this drivel, the only redeeming aspect was coming onto IMDb and seeing fellow unsatisfied viewers complaining about exactly the same thing.

"He never asked me for anything. I wish I had that kind of relationship with everybody."

"Very early on, someone took a huge crap right next to the house. That was pretty unpleasant."

"Have you learned anything unique about me through this process?"

"I'm trying really hard not to let the lack of permanence and rootedness influence my experience of tiny house living."

Congratulations, documentary. You've made me hate tiny houses, and the tiny-minded souls that live in them. And Portland.

Apparently tiny houses full of obnoxious, self-centered people, who think they're special and better than normal people.

I wonder whether the hippies in the 1960ies and 1970ies were like that? So supercilious?

Actually, the documentary is technically well made. They probably could have pulled off an insightful documentary about tiny houses, but chose instead to focus on the self-absorbed people who apparently dwell in them, based on thefar-fetched assumption that people who live in or build a trailer (let's face it, that's what they are) must somehow all have fascinating stories to tell.

By the way, tiny houses, usually going by the name of "Bauwagen" ("construction Trailer"), have been a microtrend in Germany since at least the 1980ies. I know people who have lived in them, in most larger cities there are projects where people dwell their tiny houses in public spaces ("Wagenburgen"), only there has never been such a media hype about it. That would have been an interesting angle for the documentary to explore, though.

I've noted the trend in documentaries to pretend to be on a subject, only to then refuse to give you any solid information but to turn it entirely into a people story.

I am a big proponent of the idea of being out of, avoiding and being independent from debt. Housing is the biggest hit to one's income and I thought I could learn something from this documentary.

That never happened.

Good grief. What a miserable bunch of people. None of them looked happy about anything much less providing any insight on debt and the building of a tiny house.

One can get a park model manufactured home with actual plumbing and electricity for less than these cuckolds spent building what are essentially glorified dumpsters.

They've convinced themselves their failure to launch is success and the rest of us are just greedy insular slobs.

When you fall out of that loft bed in the middle of the night, perhaps some sense and real self awareness will come along with it.

I've lived in small spaces. I love houses on wheels and surroundings that would remain the same when I move. Doing more with less. Efficiency.

If one is looking for inspiration in the search to live debt free or embrace small space living, you won't find it here. There is no inspiration in this movie.

Nor is there even a personal philosophy presented that would persuade anyone to give up even a 1000 square foot apartment, condo or house. Just self indulgent pondering and deep thoughts about, like, life, y'now.

Zombies are a real thing and four of them are featured in this movie.

Avoid. Totally wretched film.

I made it about halfway through before asking why I was watching and found myself unable to answer. I was hoping this would be more along the lines of Tiny House Nation. Watching some people deal with designing, building and learning to live in their tiny house. It is not. I seriously do not know what they were attempting to do with this film. It certainly misleads with the title. There is nothing here about design or hard choices, just a bunch of morose dialogue.

I have been interested in tiny houses and the Portland area for some time. Watching these boring Portlandiers whine about how hard everything is may have soured me on both.

Depressing documentary about nothing! No insight or challenges or joys of tiny house living. This is an hour and seven minutes of my life that I can't get back.

If you're hoping to get some insight into the practicalities of building a tiny house, this is not for you. If you're hoping to see how people live inside tiny houses or make design choices based on liveability within tiny houses, this is not for you. If you're looking for just a simple tour of a tiny home ("Here's the bathroom, here's where I sleep", etc) this is not for you. Spoiler alert: you don't get to see two of the three tiny homes featured in this film. Not the completed design, anyway. When it comes to the couple, there is no time spent on the home itself and all the time is spend on whether they want to break up. The documentary is mostly just shots of the exteriors of tiny homes currently being constructed, and lots of footage of people talking about their parents shot in the non-tiny homes they live in. At some point early on one of the tiny home owners (the only one whose home we get to see inside) makes mention of some man named Greg and that he's not there anymore with zero additional context. An hour later you find out he died. The whole time you're more curious about who the hell Greg is (Her son? Her husband? Did he die or just leave? You don't find out for almost the whole thing, and considering he has nothing to do with tiny houses it's a bit of a weird mystery to stake a documentary about tiny homes on) than anything else because you give up on actually seeing anything interesting about tiny homes about 20 minutes in. The entire time you're watching you're trying to figure out what the filmmaker is trying to achieve. I watched to the end to see the completed tiny homes, figuring that was the point of the documentary considering the whole time you're watching two of the homes being built. You never get to see them finished. What a waste of time.

If you're interested in the tiny house movement, don't waste your time or money on this.

I wanted to know more about the ideas behind the movement. I was hoping to learn a bit about the thoughts and ideologies behind choosing to live a life so different than everyone else.

I was curious as to how the tiny houses are made and how people fit their lives into these tiny homes.

In stead I got an hours worth of personal stories of people who seem to have issues with their parents. Which is all fine. They seem like nice people. But it wasn't really what I was looking for.

At no point did the documentary really give me any insight into why people choose to live like that. Or how they actually do it once the home is built.

This film is comparable to a porn film. Firstly there is no story line. Secondly, the characters seem to be getting shafted (life).This film is comparable to a porn film. Firstly there is no story line. Secondly, the characters seem to be getting shafted (life).This film is comparable to a porn film. Firstly there is no story line. Secondly, the characters seem to be getting shafted (life).

It takes real skill to make a subject like the tiny house movement seem both boring and depressing, but this documentary does it. If you're looking for inspiration just watch any of the many tiny house shows.

Yeah don't bother with this one. It just hipsters winging about how 'big' a project it is to build a glorified caravan. If they just pulled their finger out and got on with it, they'd be living in it already.

I wanted to watch a documentary on tiny houses and to be inspired.. this has done the opposite of that. There was absolutely no reason this should've been as slow paced and sad as it was.

This documentary reminds me of The General. When I reviewed The General, I stated how the overall premise was 'corrupt'. I must say something similar for this documentary. It was very tiresome to watch; I watched with my seventeen year old son and even he, a fanatic for obscurities such as this, fell asleep in my arms. The people complained the whole time about their situation that they had gotten themselves into by being 'hip' and 'millennial'. Do not watch this documentary. There are other less corrupt documentaries about this subject, and most of them do a far better job at explaining the lifestyle of someone living in small quarters. This is a soap opera, not statistics.

Having enjoyed some of the films on Netflix about new ways of living life (e.g. the minimalists, happy) I was hoping to see how a 'normal' person (or at least a person who is not utterly lost in a world of their own introspection) might go about getting involved in a Tiny house. Lets say the feeling of optimism I had on hitting the play button took only 20mins to dissipate to a numb feeling of nothingness. There is very little in this film that would inspire you to a new way of life. By minute 30 I found myself looking at my wall forgetting the TV was on. Such was the soporific dullness of those involved. This doc would be better titles 'people struggling with issues building tiny houses hoping to feel better and not really getting there'. There is one lady with a genuinely sad tale to tell. And thus the tiny house does make sense. However, there are other young people filmed who are so concerned with and about themselves and what they think about what they are thinking (which they then intend to analyse later) that I wanted to throw my TV away. They come across as painful people. At one stage a couple who haven't quite achieved anything in particular ask each other 'what have you learned from this'. The response is so utterly uninspiring that it felt like stepping into an abyss with people who were not going to 'make light' of the situation. I thought the film would show some level of happiness achieved by people trying to 'in some small way' live off the grid a little. However The film did make me realise that such escapism is really not for these people. Having too much time to think about their own thoughts, analysing those thoughts and each other, then trying to find some issue to blame it all on is mentally debilitating (especially for the viewer). They made the 'rat race' of having a job, paying rent, (think 'choose life' schpiel from Trainspotting) look like an exciting, vibrant, wonderful and most importantly happy alternative to the painful building of a tiny house. Which while therpeutic for them, was hard to watch. Alternatively, these people would be equally dissatisfied with life no matter what they were doing, big house or tiny house.

OK so there's a bunch of reviews here completely trashing this documentary because they were expecting a feature-length 'Tiny House Nation' or a how-to on building their own.

True, this documentary is not an introductory primer on going Tiny ('TINY: A Story About Living Small' is probably a better option) and actual Tiny House design and construction takes an incidental role. If you want a blow-by-blow account of what goes into building one, you'll be better served by watching an actual Instructional Video series, of which there are many available.

Instead, it offers a window past the cutesy Pinterest perfection of Tiny House blogs and whatnot, and into the day to day experiences of what it's like to actually build and live in one.

The result is by no means perfect, but it is compelling and definitely worth the watch if you're at all serious about going down this path yourself.

Personally I think the film could have benefited from a few more central characters and their stories to broaden the overall narrative. Younger, progressive US West Coasters who've never touched a power tool but still want to save the world are probably main target market for Tinys anyway and given the limited budget you can't really blame the filmmaker for focusing on Portland.

Still, it would have been good to delve into a greater range of experiences, particularly those of other couples. While Karen and Ben's trials and tribulations are worthy and meaningful viewing - particularly Karen's experiences with keeping land under her already-constructed house - Nicholette and Mitchell seem hopelessly paralysed by their ongoing existential crisis, which admittedly does make for some painful viewing at times.

Nonetheless, this beautifully-shot and edited film is a thought-provoking exercise for would-be Tiny Housers... even if it does scare you off the idea completely. Recommended.