A Documentary2026
Here Now Film presents
Selling toilets to the world's poorest communities shouldn't work - but it might be the only solution to a sanitation crisis that aid alone has never been able to solve.
Selling toilets to the world's poorest communities shouldn't work - but it might be the only solution to a sanitation crisis that aid alone has never been able to solve.
The full film will premiere on the festival circuit before arriving here.
3.5 billion people live without safe sanitation. This film is about the people who decided to stop waiting.
A toilet feels like a basic right, and delivering basic rights is usually thought of as the job of governments and charities. But after decades of vital work, the world is still a long way from reaching everyone. A Place of One's Own asks why, and follows the people pursuing a different kind of answer, one where a toilet is not something handed to a community, but something a community builds, sells, owns and keeps.
Filmed across five countries, from a single household in Puri to a design lab half a world away, the film moves between the masons, inventors, entrepreneurs and families remaking sanitation from the ground up. It resists the familiar images of hardship, letting people speak for themselves and with dignity, and finds in their stories something unexpected: that the pride of owning a solution can matter as much as the solution itself. What emerges is a portrait of agency, of people who refused to wait to be saved, and a quietly radical idea about how the world's hardest problems might actually get solved.
Namita's family once had no toilet, so the women of her household waited until nightfall to relieve themselves unseen, out in the dark and the rains where the dangers were real and sometimes fatal. Her story, which opens and closes the film, is one of profound loss and hard-won safety.
Sharifa's home was the first in the world to receive the toilet at the heart of this film, more than a decade ago. Her family's life since is a quiet measure of what a single toilet can change: children who were once often sick, now grown healthy, educated and thriving.
Esther trained as a mason after years of farming, and now makes her living selling and installing toilets across her community. Respected and well known locally, she takes pride in work that has put her children through school, and holds to a simple mission: a toilet for every household, school and church in her county.
Daigo is the inventor of the SATO pan, the deceptively simple technology at the centre of the film. Working with his team at American Standard, he developed it for the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, travelling to Bangladesh to study what communities truly needed. But designing a toilet, it turns out, is only the beginning.
After losing her mother suddenly to diarrhoea, Shomy turned her grief into a mission. Through her organisation Awareness 360, she mobilises young people to lead community service projects, and serves as one of the film's guides through the complexity of bringing safety to 3.5 billion people.
Alex knows the cost of poor sanitation from his own childhood, when the school toilets were so foul he would strip off layers of clothing before facing them. Today he is driven to bring safe sanitation to as many people as possible through sustainable business, building out the whole value chain so that entire communities, not just individual households, are better off.
The electronic press kit includes synopses, a director's statement, contributor biographies, technical specifications and high resolution stills.
Request the press kitFestival screening dates will be announced here. A private screener is available to accredited programmers and press on request.
