Family Gossip Night
The brief
The Count Till Ten campaign for UNDP and the Dawaer Foundation covered both misinformation and hate speech. This film took the second half, which is the harder of the two. Fake news can at least be checked against a fact. Hate speech usually arrives as something nobody in the room would call hate speech.
Production approach
Fine Line produced the spot in Lebanon and set it at a family gathering, because that is where most people actually encounter it. The evening starts as light chit-chat. It slides, without anyone marking the moment, into harmful labelling and the trading of hateful rumours about people who are not in the room. Then it leaves the room, forwarded on through WhatsApp groups.
The film deliberately gives no one a villain’s moment. There is no speech, no confrontation and nobody who could be pointed at as the bigot of the family. The drift is the subject. Showing how ordinary the talk sounds up close is the only way to make an audience consider that they have sat at that table, and a film that lets viewers off the hook by making the speaker monstrous would not do that.
Outcome
It closes on the campaign’s second line: let your words be free of hate. The argument underneath it is that everyday talk and a quick forward can chip away at social cohesion, and that words can damage or heal.
It was one of several films in the same campaign, alongside Back to Centrale, Horses Are the Future and Layal in the Hospital. Across the campaign the work reached 11.2 million people and recorded 896,000 engagements, more than doubling its five million reach target.
Client: UNDP × Dawaer Foundation · Production: Fine Line Production · Lebanon, 2022
← All posts
