Amnesty International

Brief

Since 2016, European governments have deported more than 10,000 people to Afghanistan, despite it being the second most dangerous country in the world.

This is when Amnesty got in touch with us. They wanted a social video to spearhead a European-wide campaign to raise awareness of the issue. They needed content outputs that would feel native across all their social media channels and it needed to be easily localised for all languages and regions, without subtitles, so no country would feel the ‘poor relation’.

Approach

We wanted to move away from a fact and figure based narrative and focus on the emotions of those involved and the fear they face. Everyone can relate to fear and trepidation associated with flying and we used this empathy to draw the audience in and focused the film on one person, on a plane for a matter of seconds. We were aware that the content needed to work across all their social platforms so we needed to create a piece of content that was visually appealing, emotionally arresting, and highly shareable.

Outcomes

The film was launched simultaneously in a number of formats across Facebook, twitter and Instagram by Amnesty International’s global team, as well as local offices throughout Europe. It was Amnesty global’s first every piece of Instagram TV output launching their channel – and was also their most successful IG story in that period. 

The global film drove strong engagement across social but more importantly, in combination with Amnesty’s hard work behind the scenes, Taibeh Abbasi and her family, whose Norwegian deportation case was the initial inspiration, were not accepted into Afghanistan. She is now back, safe in Norway, though there is clearly still much work to be done on the issue.