Festival launch
Client: Made, Territory: International, Year: 2020
An island in the Baltic Sea was once a place where mentally disturbed women could find shelter and treatment.
Finnish production company Made approached us in 2020 to work on SJÄLÖ – ISLAND OF SOULS. Mathias and Joanna had already fallen in love with the project as experts for dok.incubator, so we were very excited to help promote the film for its world premiere at CPH:DOX, a festival that went fully online because of the outburst of Covid-19.
The film explores the island of Själö, a place that was used for centuries to lock down women who were considered socially transgressive. The film gives a voice to these women by reading their letters and putting their whispers into images.
Quite naturally, we decided to go for a very poetic and visually striking campaign. We wanted to allow potential viewers to enter into the universe of Lotta and her film, without focusing on the plot.
However, for the posts that were more informative in the campaign, we decided to focus on the “giving a voice to women whose voice has been taken away”-element, a strong and very contemporary approach.
Mathias Noschis
Project Manager
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The strategy
This is one of the last campaigns for which Facebook was our main hub, with Instagram being just a secondary platform. We started the campaign with the selection announcement and went on until a week after CPH:DOX.
We were initially planning a campaign mostly aimed at industry professional, with a small audience focus, mostly towards women in the Nordic countries. But the fact the festival had to go entirely online because of COVID made us adapt the campaign quite radically.
We did of course promote our posts to industry professionals, but we also engaged cinephiles and feminists in Denmark, to get them to watch the film on VOD.
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Results
I think the quality of the visuals was very high, and it helped position the film as a cinematic and sensorial experience. The visual unity between all assets is very strong and gave coherence to the campaign and its message.
The highlight of the campaign was the animated poster created by our designer Sylwia. It is in our top 3 of Alphapanda’s best visuals of all times. We love animated posters in general because they have that magical effect on viewers, especially on film professionals. And this one in particular is so well crafted.
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