Ben Lewis

“From hunter-gatherers to the modern-day underclass, this animated look at poverty through the ages was a miracle of clarity and compassion,” Lucy Mangan, Guardian review, 28th Nov, 2012

Do we know what poverty is? Throughout human existence, the poor have always been with us. Beginning with the Neolithic age, Ben Lewis’s funny and sinister animated odyssey takes us through the changing image of poverty – helping us define what poverty looks like today and question whether it is inevitable.

A BBC Storyville film, produced in partnership with the Open University, Poor Us screens as part of Why Poverty? – when the BBC, in conjunction with more than 70 broadcasters around the world, hosts a debate about contemporary poverty. The global cross-media event sees the same eight films screened in 180 countries to explore why, in the 21st Century, a billion people still live in poverty.

“Poor Us was a miracle of clarity and compression. It wore its learning lightly and deployed it well, informing the ignorant (among which I count myself) without – I imagine – insulting the intelligence of those better acquainted with the subject. If I may speak for my fellow ignoramuses, it was as if someone was reaching into your brain in every scene and briskly dusting off broken fragments of books and articles read, uniting disparate thoughts, supplementing others, planting new ones and oiling the rusting machinery at your cerebral centre that would allow you, once the new, knowledge-salve had worked its way thoroughly round, to cogitate further at your leisure. This is not a feeling you get often from television. You were richer for watching it.” Lucy Mangan, Guardian

Read the full Guardian Review here