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Miritte Ben Yitzchak 
Animator
Miritte Ben Yitzchak is the first to admit that for a lot of her life, she ‘lived in my own little bubble; I didn’t think about the environment, particularly, or climate change.’ But when she read a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)* two years ago, ‘that said we had 12 years left to save the planet,’ it shocked her out of complacency. ‘I was suddenly really overwhelmed,’ she says from her home studio in Bristol. ‘I thought, “How didn’t I know this before?” How is everyone else continuing as normal? It felt like this huge emergency that I hadn’t seen before.’

The urgency propelled her to create a piece of work about what she had learned: a graphic designer by training (she studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam), she taught herself animation four years ago. The film, called Climate Change and Why We Should Panic, is a beautiful piece of animation, with a mix of digital illustrations and added layers of brush strokes ‘to provide a tactile, emotional element’.

The raw naivety of the drawings contrasts sharply with the infographics and statistics offered, exemplifying the stark message that our time is running out. ‘I wanted to engage with them on an emotional level,’ says Ben Yitzchak.
The film was also intended to engage the kind of person that she herself had been: someone who needed shocking into awareness. She contacted Extinction Rebellion, who loved it. They engaged a sound engineer to work with Ben Yitzchak, plus Keira Knightley to voice the film, which was released in 2019.

Now Ben Yitzchak, 48, has released a follow up with the group: Extinction Emergency and Why We Must Act Now. ‘It was always meant to be a mini-series,’ she says. It is a powerful call to arms, heightened by the urgent, eerie-sounding score written by Brian Eno and a script voiced by Naomie Harris. This year there is, she feels, ‘change in the air’, with Black Lives Matter protests around the globe, along with a glimmer of respite for the battered planet during lockdown. But, she admits, she is not entirely filled with hope. ‘I am a bit frightened. I have a ten-year-old daughter and I find it impossible to imagine what the planet will look like in 40 years’ time.

The pandemic came and suddenly we saw that governments around the world were able to use their power to make big changes. That showed so many things can be done. But they don’t seem to treat climate change in the same way. It’s difficult to understand why it’s not being treated as the emergency it should be.’ As her films plead: we must act now, before it’s too late. JS
Follow Ben Yitzchak on @miritte_cubicleWORDS JESSICA SALTER | PHOTOGRAPH EDD HORDER