PROJECT UNLONELY FILMS Season 9

Do Not Feed The Pigeons

Antonin Niclass

Director

Runtime: 08:40 min
Even in a lonely, revolting and boring place such as a coach station, a little bit of harmony can always be found…
DifferenceModernity

Filmmaker's Inspiration

I have always been drawn towards portraying feelings of loneliness and melancholy. These are usually the people I see first and that move me the most. I would witness these feelings in many different forms whenever I travelled late at night from a city to another. That’s how the first ideas came about. I like the oxymoron of « shared loneliness » : people that have nothing in common and don’t seem eager to communicate happen to share the same bubble for a few hours. They are forced to live together and maybe find common grounds before going back to their separate lives. To write the film, we decided to spend one night in Victoria Coach Station. Not to travel but only to observe travellers. We were knee deep into this melancholy, but could also feel that a beauty was hidden beneath the dirty sad walls of the station. Something that would reveal itself only if you managed to acknowledge your surroundings. The process of creating the film actually took place at the same time as the first lockdown in the UK and people being separated suddenly had a strange yet poignant resonance with our story. But as everyone was being isolated from the rest of the world, we also witnessed a feeling of community, with people helping each other and coming together.

Meet the Filmmaker

Antonin Niclass

Antonin is a Swiss and French animation director based in Lausanne and London.

He started as a camera assistant in Switzerland which allowed him to learn a lot on cameras, lenses and lights. He decided to move to Belgium to study filmmaking and learned to work as a Director with larger crews on fiction, television and radio projects.

Besides his studies, he produced numerous animation clips for Tataki (the digital branch of Swiss Television for young adults) and learned a lot by working with many different animators, mixing various forms and techniques.

He pursued his passion for animation by joining the National Film & Television School in the United Kingdom. His graduation film “Do Not Feed The Pigeons” won the BAFTA for Best British Short Animation in 2022.

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Project UnLonely Films selects 35–40 films that explore themes of loneliness, connection, and belonging from diverse perspectives.

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