Giving Compass' Take:

• Hunger By the Sea is an animated short film that portrays food poverty through the eyes of individuals who go to a food bank in a seaside town in England. 

• The film is animated because it was a difficult task to record individuals to talk about their experiences with food banks. The animation is a way to portray people's real experiences while maintaining anonymity. 

• Read about defining the success of food banks through the quality of food rather than quantity. 

"You can't say it's your own fault if you've had to change benefits for some reason. You can say it's our fault if we went out and blown [the money] in the bookies or in the pubs, then yeah, it would be our own fault. Most people just can't afford to pay rent and buy food."

These are the words of one of the contributors in my film, Hunger by the Sea, a four-minute animation about people’s experiences of food banks in an English seaside town. Using voiceovers, it presents the human stories behind food bank use — which hit a record high in 2018.

Figures from the Trussell Trust, the UK’s biggest food bank provider, show that between April 2017 and March 2018 there was a 13% increase in the number of three-day emergency food supplies given out compared to the previous year (they now count food parcels rather than people). They gave out 1,332,952 of these supply packages, and 484,026 of these went to children.

I’m a documentary filmmaker and academic at Bournemouth University, and I worked with students on this idea. My initial plan was to give people who use food banks cameras, allowing them to become first-person storytellers and speak directly to policymakers and politicians. But after my student researcher, Charlie Mott, spent several weeks volunteering in three local food banks, it became clear that people were ashamed to admit they had had to resort to food banks. They felt it was their fault; they did not want to be visible.

The project was then recast as an animation in which people could speak openly and anonymously, and so we took on another co-researcher, Xue Han, an animation student. Even with this new plan, we had to approach 14 different food banks before finding one that was prepared to let us record people’s voices.

Read the full article about Hunger by the Sea by Sue Sudbury at Global Citizen