Then, suffering from intense back trouble, he started smoking crack to alleviate the pain and grief. He tried to keep on working but his addiction and spiralling debts cost him his house. Eventually he ended up on the streets. Away From Home: Rob, Sophia Twigt’s film screening at the Annecy festival in June, tells his story. It is one of three animated documentary shorts that she has made about homeless people. These films allow their subjects to preserve their anonymity.

“You do not actually have to see who is talking,” Twigt says. The initial interviews were carried out by editor and researcher Simone Eleveld, but the subjects’ real voices are heard on screen. Twigt experimented with different animation styles for the three episodes. Rob’s story was “kind of rough” and so the director adopted a raw, free flowing technique, using crayons. “I also wanted to make him understandable and likeable,” Twigt remembers. “His story is so heavy, but he has a kind of humour.”

The aim behind the series is to treat homelessness in a sympathetic, matter of fact way, and to make the audience understand how easily anybody’s life can spiral out of control. The public is most likely to encounter the homeless begging on the streets, but when you have the patience to listen to someone’s story, you see him or her in a very different way, Twigt suggests. 

“There is a stereotyped view of people who are homeless, I wanted to change that.”

Away From Home: Rob shows the bureaucratic hurdles facing Rob when he tries to get off the streets. He needs a pass to get into a shelter but no-one will give him one. "No," Twigt says, "this is not intended as a heavy political statement.” Instead, she simply wants viewers to understand the plight of the homeless. Sometimes, acquaintances will not even realise that someone has nowhere to sleep. That was the case with Ellen, another of Twigt’s subjects.

“Her friends did not know. Everyone thought she was OK but she was homeless. I think a lot of people are in trouble and they slowly drift away. They do not want to ask for help…before you know it, you are in trouble too big to get out of it.”

The subjects  - Rob, Ellen and Boris - have now all seen the films about them. “They were all happy with the end results,” Twigt says. “It is quite strange to see your life story in five minutes.” The director works for leading Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, one of the backers of her animated shorts, in its cross-media department. All three films are available on a special page on De Volkskrantwebsite.

This is a continuation of Twigt’s graduation project from her Masters in animation at the renowned St. Joost school, realised a year and a half after she graduated. “The idea of visualising people that want to stay anonymous comes out of my graduation project,” she says. Twigt came to animation having initially studied graphic design at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Her work has a strong journalistic undertow and she believes in using animation to tell stories about the lives of real people.

She did all the animation on the three shorts completely on her own, albeit with help on the music and sound design from her brother Vincent, and with support from Simone Eleveld, who edited the films and conducted the interviews. Twigt submitted all three of the films to Annecy and is delighted that Away From Home: Rob has actually been chosen for the festival. She will make every effort to get there for the screening.

The director still has her day job, freelancing at De Volkskrant, and hopes to work on more animated projects in a similar vein to Away From Home: Rob. “I really like to work in the genre of animated documentary… if there is an opportunity in that direction, I would love to do it,” Twigt ends.


For more Information:
- Overview Dutch (co)productions at Annecy 2021 and Screening Schedule
- Showreels Dutch animation at Annecy 2021
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival