Layal in the Hospital
The brief
Most advice about misinformation assumes someone somewhere is lying. Usually nobody is. A story passes through enough well-meaning people that it arrives somewhere its first teller would not recognise. That is the version of the problem this film for UNDP and the Dawaer Foundation was asked to show, as part of the Count Till Ten campaign.
Production approach
Fine Line produced the spot in Lebanon and built it as a chain rather than a scene. Layal has a minor injury. The film then tracks the story as it is passed along, and each retelling adds a little. What began as a simple case of food poisoning escalates into a supposed life-threatening crisis, and the film runs slightly longer than the other spots in the campaign because the escalation needs enough links in the chain to be felt rather than asserted.
The register is light and relatable throughout. Nobody in the chain is malicious, which is what makes the ending land. Every person who made the story worse was, in their own mind, passing on something they had been told and had no reason to doubt.
Outcome
The closing instruction is the campaign’s: fact-check before you share, and count to ten before sharing. Coming at the end of a chain where no single person did anything obviously wrong, it reads as a practical habit rather than an accusation.
It sits alongside Back to Centrale, Horses Are the Future and Family Gossip Night in the same campaign, which reached 11.2 million people and recorded 896,000 engagements against a five million target.
Client: UNDP × Dawaer Foundation · Production: Fine Line Production · Lebanon, 2022
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