Watch: An Animated Journey Through the 2005 London Underground Suicide Bombings

Whether they choose to accept it or not, inhabitants of large cities are confronted daily with the possibility of bombings like those in the London Underground at King’s Cross on July 7, 2005, grippingly and frighteningly brought to life in Georgina Ferguson’s and Eduarda Lima’s beautiful animation ‘Seven Seven.’ The sad reality, and one which this film works against, is that unless you experience it firsthand, such an event will often have little meaning for you–it registers as a news item, albeit a frightening one, with abstracts: x dead, x injured, x amount of damage. ‘Seven Seven,’ though, marks Ferguson first public description of the event, and how she escaped the wreckage of the train. The piece uses muted colors, perfect to show how the suicide bombings disrupted, indeed shattered an everyday commute, which began like many other commutes–and how the event shaped the lives of the people who survived them. Few details are used for the film’s figures, and yet the events are rendered with unquestionable precision, in a sense. Think, as you watch this piece, how you would feel if this happened to you–without the protection of newsprint, which could make a beheading sound not much more important than a foul in a baseball game, the effect could be devastating, lasting a million times as long as the minute length of the explosion itself.