Many congratulations to Dr Claas Kirchhelle and Dr Samantha Vanderslott (at Oxford Vaccine Group and Oxford Martin School) who along with Oxford animator Ben Leighton won the Professional Science Fact Film Prize at the Bristol Science Film Festival for their animation about typhoid fever. Bristol Science Film Festival runs an annual science film competition to showcase film-makers telling the most interesting facts (or science fictions). Shortlisted films are normally screened on the Big Screen in Bristol but this year the event was virtual. For 2020 there were 450 entries across both the science fact and fiction categories with 32 films in the official selection.
'The Adventures of Alice in Typhoidland’ (2020) is a short (~6m) film about how typhoid plagued the population of Victorian England and is still a major global health threat today. By using the character Alice Liddell – Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – we delve beneath Victorian Oxford’s dreaming spires and idyllic River Thames and discover the murky underside of the city and the battle to rid it of typhoid. 'The Adventures of Alice in Typhoidland’ animation forms part of a unique physical and digital exhibition about the past and present of typhoid fever: www.typhoidland.org
Judges commended the pace and clarity of the narrative, the aesthetics of the animation, the originality of the idea and the final call to action.
Directors/writers: Claas Kirchhelle and Samantha Vanderslott
Animator: Ben Leighton
Voice: Emily Berrington
Scientific input: Andy Pollard, Jenny Hill, Maria Moore, Sarah Loving at Oxford Vaccine Group