Output details

Guantanamo Bay: The Hunger Strikes

This is a five minute animated film for The Observer spearheading a humanitarian campaign to raise awareness of the plight of 100+ detainees at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (GTMO), 44 of whom have resorted to hunger strike in protest against unfair treatment. The challenge of creating campaigning animation of this nature is how to make a film about such a bleak subject in such a way as to sustain an audience’s interest.

Hand drawn character and location designs formed the basis of 2D digital animation, which was combined with a soundtrack featuring actors reading edited transcripts of testimonies from several of the detainees. My role was director, designer and art director and co-writer of the film working in consultation with Mustafa Khalili, a journalist from The Observer, and the not-for-profit legal firm Reprieve UK who represent several of the Guantanamo detainees. The Observer also gave me access to many pages of interviews with detainees recorded by visiting defence lawyers from the Reprieve organization.

My intention was to give the audience as unsettling an experience as possible to give an insight into the unrelenting misery these detainees are experiencing. The prisoners exist in a state of uncertainty, hanging in limbo and my approach was to focus on the daily routine of systematic abuse experienced by the prisoners and in particular show the force feeding procedure in minute clinical and graphic detail.

The film was premiered on the Observer.Guardian.co.uk website in October 2013.

The output is presented via portfolio, which should be viewed in order to gain a proper understanding of the research.