Hope Is Lost

Arriving in the UK from Nigeria - on “Colonial Airlines” (with a very familiar logo!), a mother and her two children apply for asylum at the immigration desk. They are admitted and an appointment is made with the already significantly over-subscribed Home Office to discuss their circumstances, but with only ten days left of the 20th century and her sister unable to put them up, “Hope” needs to find somewhere to house her family out of the biting winter weather. Luckily, she espies a card on the wall of the phone box for “Ola” whom she calls and who offers to help them out with some very basic accommodation. That proves vitally useful, but next day we begin to appreciate that he might not be quite the generous Christmas spirit that he claimed to be…! I like this style of claymation and paper-mâché animation and the quality of the facial expressions, the hairstyles, the tears and the attention to the detail - shops like “Christian Bior” and “Ducci” as well as some detail on the newspaper headlines give this story of chilly desperation an extra degree of depth as it shows us the lengths to which she will go to protect her children. This is well worth a quarter of an hour.