The Price of Free  

Kailash Satyarthi has taken more than 87,000 children out of slavery. The film follows him and his team as they go looking for more, into kilns and factories, unarmed. Two parts of the story were never filmed: the raid that started all of it, and a later one a friend didn't come back from. Those are the two animated sequences.

The first is the raid. We stay with him the whole way — the house before he leaves, the drive, the kiln. The painting moves with the pressure: rough, almost primal marks when things tip, then settling into finished landscape when there's room to breathe. The color does the same. Blues at home, orange and yellow once they arrive.

The second is called Crash. Dhoom Das was a friend, beaten to death by a crowd, and Kailash still carries it. The problem was how to show that. We put you where he was — inside a crowd moving like water, close enough to see it happening and too far away to reach him. The blows are never shown. The film is about courage without violence, and the animation couldn't earn its place by supplying some.

92 min · 5 min of animation · 2018