Horror story: Living with air pollution
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 film shown here tells the story of 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.
