Today, Llamau, in collaboration with Gritty Realism Productions screened the first live showing of an animated film highlighting the subject of youth homelessness.

Funded by the Arts Council of Wales, the film uses animation to tackle the subject of youth homelessness in a radical new way with a core group of young people who have little or no access to arts activities.

The film journeys through a personal account of the lives of two young women living in a Llamau Supported Accommodation; offering an insight into their past and present as well as highlighting their future ambitions.

The young people involved used the medium of drawn and silhouette animation to recreate and explore these ideas for themselves working directly under the camera to tell this story using their own artwork.

The focus was to highlight the fact that young people can, through no fault of their own, become homeless and also that they have positive hopes and ambitions for the future like any other young person. 

Sharing her thoughts on the film, shown at Chapter Arts in Cardiff this afternoon, Llamau’s CEO, Frances Beecher said

It is so very important that we have the chance to hear young people’s experiences directly and that they can see that by being brave enough to share their stories, things can change including attitudes to homelessness.

What is very clear from today is that young people become homelessness through no fault of their own. That young people’s behaviours are not seen as a way of trying to communicate how stressed and unhappy they are, and that sadly, instead of being supported and helped, they are punished or find themselves homelessness. We have to all work to change this and we can only do that if we understand and learn from the experts by experience.

Opportunities like this make a huge difference to young people and women supported by Llamau. Engaging in new and exciting projects like animation and filming offers them the chance to learn new skills and consider career pathways they may never have considered before.

Llamau would like to thank all the young people involved from the Senghenydd Youth Drop in Centre, the production team at Gritty Realism and the Arts Council of Wales for funding such an important piece of work.