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Commemorating the centenary of Armistice of the First World War, this short film combines three poems written by men who died in the bloody conflict. Their poignant words are linked together by a loose narrative rendered in cut-out puppetry, forming something of a three-act exploration of the war from the perspective of those who fought in it. In the poem ‘The Owl’ (1915) by the English writer Edward Thomas, a narrator considers the gap between those to whom discomfort is a temporary nuisance, and the ‘soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’. In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1920) by the English poet Wilfred Owen, a narrator spares no horrific detail while describing the experience of chemical warfare. And the Canadian poet John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915) is told, quite hauntingly, from the perspective of the war’s buried dead.
Video by the Poetry Foundation and Manual Cinema
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes