The short movie was created within the Master of Animation program of AKV|StJoost. It came from an idea of Beeldtijd, a company which works with moving images and mainly social issues. The project wanted to tell the stories of families and civilians that lived in Brabant during World War Two, through their eyes. This allowed them to tell some stories that were personal, intimate and localized. In fact, they wanted to work on the emotional side and produce something that could be personal and powerful. The whole project was based on some interviews to some civil witnesses of Second World War: from each one of them they took one memory, one event, and they asked someone to animate it. The technichal choice was due to their aim to be more captivating than usual documentaries and to make it available for younger generation: in fact, the target audience for this whole operation was from twelve to fifteen years old. Another reason for this choice is that the witnesses tent to have floating memories: through animation we tried to fill those gaps and build a story that could be faithful to the interview itself, but cold also speak so contemporary audiences.
To achieve this result, we decided to go for a storytelling, look, and character design which could relate at the same time with old footage and a fresh, emotionally-driven approach. We decided to animate the whole short with a frame by frame 2D animation, with 3D modeled backgrounds.
The specific interview that was assigned to us was about a woman who was 23 at the time of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. She and her husband were the owners of a butcher shop and they had childrens. Nevertheless, she managed to hide and save entire families of Jews from deportation and ultimately death. The story and environment revolve around the idea that her house is at the same time a protection and a cage, while depicting the enemies as a system, not necessarily nazist, but something evil, that has to do with betrayal, gossip and not "being a decent person".
