Hope is Lost (2025)

When you think of the materials that bring a stop-motion short to life – popsicle sticks and tin foil probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. Yet Eno Enefiok has crafted a moving story of a young woman’s first 10 days in the UK after fleeing her home country using exactly those everyday items.

Hope is Lost draws on Eno’s own experience arriving in the UK from Nigeria as a child. Believing she was on holiday, she, her mother, and her siblings were instead fleeing for safety. Over time, Eno came to understand the challenges her mother faced and felt compelled to share this story with others.

Turning Trash into Storytelling Magic

The Role of Recycled Materials

Working on a tight budget, Eno turned to recycled materials for her puppets and sets. High-cost armature rigs prompted her to innovate, using what was already at hand.

“Growing up in Nigeria, we have a culture where we don’t throw trash away. I don’t think I saw Tupperware until I’d left home because we just reused ice cream tubs until they wore worn out. As a kid, if I ate a popsicle, I’d keep the wooden sticks to make something from. As an adult, I still do it. So, I started taking these discarded things to use in the film. I’m vegan and would get falafel takeaway as a treat, then keep the tinfoil. It’s strong quality and they give you loads – so that was used for the puppet heads!”

The process also shaped the story itself: creating puppets this way was so time-consuming that Eno reduced three child characters to two, proving an early lesson for filmmakers to “kill your darlings.”

For the sets, cardboard became her go-to material. Expensive or labour-intensive alternatives like new or used wood weren’t feasible, and Eno embraced the DIY look:

“It actually works as it’s a period film set twenty plus years ago. It has a flickery quality to it, not the smoothness of stop motion animation you see today. I didn’t want it to look so clean that it could be CGI! I took a gamble, but I think it works.”

Driving a Cultural Shift Toward Sustainable Filmmaking

Compromise is part of sustainable filmmaking. For example, exterior street scenes needed natural elements like wind and snow. Creating these by hand was slow, so Eno carefully selected craft shop materials for key moments.

Above all, sustainability relies on an aligned crew:

“If you have a team of people who are keen on being sustainable then you bring in just one person who’s not, it spoils the whole effort. For example, if everyone is recycling carefully and one person isn’t, it contaminates the bins then everyone’s effort is undone. So, I think it’s a matter of setting examples and seeking out crew who are of the same mind. In the way that we’re now more aware of making crews diverse, we need to take the same approach to sustainability. Then it filters out more widely too. For example, when you get press for the film, you can talk about sustainability, and it encourages more people to think. People copy each other, they follow the herd. And we need to make the herd care.”

This case study was undertaken with the support of the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery, as part of the Sustainable Screen Fund to support all BFI National Lottery awardees in building environmental understanding and action on positive environmental change. Find out more about our partnership with the BFI here.