Horror stories: Films capture life in polluted spaces
Journalist Emily Whitehouse speaks to the team behind a new film project designed to showcase the heartbreaking realities of what it’s like living in poor quality accommodation.
Films aren’t new and mostly they aren’t real. However, a research team, known as Tackling Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development (TRUUD), is using films to raise awareness of a very real problem that can’t be ignored: air pollution. The organisation have commissioned three separate short films, two of which follow the lives of families forced to live in homes plagued with damp and mould and in areas with high pollution levels.
‘For years our research has focused on how to improve unhealthy standards in the built environment, and we decided to use films as a way to influence decision makers and raise awareness,’ said Dr Jo White of the University of West England in Bristol, who commissioned the films. ‘Behind the data there are real people and we wanted to bring their stories to life. We decided to use film to showcase this because young people especially are more likely to look at a film, if it’s not too long, rather than sit down and read through a dense academic paper.’
Dr White has been a senior research fellow at the University of West England since 2015 and has been working with TRUUD, based at the University of Bristol, since 2020. Commissioned last year, each of the three films focuses on the mental and physical repercussions that come with living in poorly ventilated and cramped homes in environments suffering from poor air quality and a lack of green space.
The first film follows Samuel and his two young sons who live in a 15th floor one-bedroom flat and share the same bed. The second looks at Shakar and his family, who are living in a property situated by a main road in Manchester. They are forced to suffer from severe noise and traffic pollution and his wife, and two of his sons, are struggling with asthma. The final film outlines Kadra and Wendy’s story who are trying to raise their children in damp homes.
The hope is that these films will be to help educate people on how dangerous it is to live in such environments. In recent months, the government have announced new measures to help improve living conditions. Uppermost among these is the introduction of ‘Awaab’s Law’, which puts the onus on social landlords to investigate and fix damp and mould problems in properties within a strict time frame.
Against this backdrop, Dr White is similarly keen to raise awareness about the blight of traffic on those forced to live close to it and Shakar’s story is particularly impactful. A family whose dream home slowly became a nightmare as, one by one, they succumbed to debilitating respiratory problems.
Dr White says that whilst it is heartbreaking that people lose their lives to air pollution, people don’t talk about how mentally draining it must be to be scared of your own home or too afraid to step outside.With this in mind, she says the team quickly got to work creating the films. Whilst making them, they agreed that one of the most important factors was shooting in different locations to show air pollution isn’t just a regional issue, it’s ‘a national crisis’.
‘We commissioned a TV company called Drummer TV who are local to Bristol and when it came to shooting the damp and mould film, we had some of our team head up to Manchester,’ Dr White says.
‘The film is split into two parts and details the stories of Wendy, who’s based in Manchester, and Kadra, who’s in Bristol. We thought it was vital to include the different locations as although the cities are located at opposite ends of the country, and are governed by different authorities, these families are facing the same problem. We are also aware that damp and mould problems don’t just appear in one type of property, so we thought it was important to include two different types of lets. Kadra lives in a socially rented home and Wendy lives in a private let.’
The work TRUUD and Drummer TV have devoted to raising awareness around the situation has been exceptional.
TRUUD were given a budget of £10,000 to create the films which have already been viewed eleven and a half thousand times (at the time of writing). Dr White says ‘ten thousand of the views have gone on Wendy and Kadra’s film which just goes to show how important the issue of damp and mould is at the moment. Following the success of these films, some of our researchers are using the films with national-level government to raise awareness of the links between urban development decisions and health’
Moreover, Dr White claims that making the films has presented her with the chance to start making a difference. Jo’s team on TRUUD has recently been working on public engagement methods to promote ‘low traffic’ and ‘liveable’ neighbourhoods and will be working with local authorities to use the films to inform about the dangers of air pollution and explain the rationale behind such schemes.
Although the film project has been wrapped up, Dr White explains that her work with them is far from over. ‘This project has given us so much food for thought about how media could perhaps be the best tool for raising awareness about issues in this country. Whilst working on this project we always knew we wanted to create three short pictures, but now we’re thinking about creating even shorter visual aids that could help councils and organisations looking to implement new schemes that would help improve air quality standards in England.’
Dr White adds: ‘We’re thinking they could be in the form of small graphics with key statistics on them so people could take them to meetings as a way of backing up their argument. We believe people in this country could be doing more to help address poor air quality levels, however we’re glad to see people have found our films and will continue to raise awareness about the dangers associated with air quality.’
This article originally appeared in the June issue of Air Quality News magazine
