In 2023, we commissioned Ernie Maltby to make Vyhod/Exit as part of a trio of animations titled Paradise, Lost, part of our Adam Reynolds Award Shortlist programme. Fresh from their Best Animation win at the Ottawa Film Awards, Ernie takes us behind the scenes to find out how the film was made.

Find out more about Paradise, Lost


Please be advised: this video contains some flashing lights and stroboscopic effects. 

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About the film

A surreal and kaleidoscopic meander through strained memories of prevailing state complicity, by a UK-based emerging artist and filmmaker.

Reflecting on growing up in Russia, ambivalence & grief surrounding home and healthcare enmesh in echoes of planned negligence, conditioned immunity to war, and erasure of communities. 

Scavenged materials, whirring scraps of machinery and interrogatory lighting are forged into life in corners of domesticity against a boiling musical score to create a modern fairytale.

A coloured pencil landscape drawing in red, green, blue and yellow. A tearful sketched face dominates the image with small objects such as beer cans or bottles surrounding it with phrases such as: ‘I don’t recognise myself in the mirror anymore’.

Ernie Maltby

Ernie Maltby is a visual artist and animator based in East Devon. Their practice is influenced by the complexities among the dislocating and transitional experiences of migration, bodily autonomy, loss, and disability.

Maltby primarily focuses on themes surrounding the exploration of space and the heartbreak that surrounds it, how we occupy and engage with it geophysically, and what it means to exist in the space of your own body. These dichotomies create ground for exploration using performative introspectiveness, examining home and belonging within an unrecognisable self-identity.


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