NFTS Animation Film ‘The Fire Next Time’ Selected for Sundance Film Festival 2021
Skwigly
NFTS Animation Film Inspired by 2011 London Riots Selected for Sundance Film Festival
The National Film and Television School (NFTS) is thrilled to announce that graduate animation film The Fire Next Time, has been selected for the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, the only UK animated short to be included.
The atmospheric and powerful seven minute film by Directing Animation MA graduate Renaldho Pelle was inspired by the 2011 London riots, blending hand painted character animation with stylised stop motion sets built to a scale of 1:50 by students of the NFTS Model Making for Animation Diploma.
The Sundance Film Festival will run online from 28th January to 3rd February 2021 with The Fire Next Time one of only three UK shorts screened. A total of just 50 ‘bold and creative’ shorts were selected by the Sundance Jury with 9,000 entries submitted from all over the world.
In The Fire Next Time, rioting spreads as social inequality causes tempers in a struggling community to flare, but as the people rebel the oppressive environment takes on a life of its own as the shadows of the housing estate around them close in. The film, which premiered at the ‘animation Oscars’, Annecy International Animation Festival earlier this year, was developed during an experimental module at the NFTS and utilises a novel approach to the classic, and notoriously challenging ‘paint on glass’ animation technique, combining it with brutalist inspired stop motion sets and projection.
Director Renaldho Pelle who graduated from the NFTS in 2019 said:
It feels really humbling for The Fire Next Time to have been selected for the Sundance Festival, I wasn’t expecting it at all. I hope the film might encourage people to feel compassion for the problems of others which perhaps they do not share, and help them begin to think about how they might bring about change.
Head of Directing Animation at NFTS Robert Bradbrook said:
We’re very proud that The Fire Next Time has been selected for the Sundance Film Festival. The film follows an NFTS tradition of using animation to explore tricky subjects and exposing them to a wider audience. Through his gestural brush-strokes, combined with the brutalist model sets of London estates, Renaldho beautifully captures the tensions in his neighbourhood that led to the 2011 riots. While the film was often difficult in the making, the final results highlight the outstanding teamwork within the production and a director who never gave up on his vision.
The Making of ‘The Fire Next Time’, by Renaldho Pelle
“My hope for The Fire Next Time was that the film might encourage people to feel compassion for the problems of others which perhaps they do not share, and help them begin to think about how they might bring about change.
Director Renaldho Pelle working on The Fire Next Time at the NFTS Animation Workshop in 2019
Some people are fighters, they don’t have the tools to express themselves in other ways. I am a talker and a maker. I feel responsible for articulating the issues of people around me and I strongly feel the importance of the 2011 riots has been neglected or worse, deliberately diminished. I am surprised by how easily the actions of so many were dismissed as solely motivated by greed.
To believe that alone says a lot about society’s view of its most deprived. For me rioting is an expression of people’s power and agency over the spaces they inhabit. Like many of those interviewed after the riots of 2011, I feel anger. Anger that those who enforce the law are willing to use force and sometimes even take lives on suspicion of some minor offence. And at those who would justify those actions.
Director Renaldho Pelle and Model Making student Oliver Arnell Argles prep the laser cut 1:50 scale model ahead of filming
I feel scared because I myself and most of those whom I love are part of that group that mean so little to society. I feel angry at how difficult it is for those of us from poor backgrounds to share the benefits of our society. At how hard we have to fight to follow the ‘right’ path, and how easily we are condemned when we do not. Angry at feeling outside of the society I have been born into. I am sure I am not alone in feeling this way, and that is why I made The Fire Next Time.”