—CAUSE
Drug trafficking—CLIENT
Abogacia foundationPROBLEM
Drug trafficking exists in every culture around the world. This practice mainly affects the most vulnerable social groups which, in the face of extreme economic need, participate in this kind of business and suffer the consequences of a corrupt system.
OUR TAKE
Fundación Abogacía Española is a non-profit organization that promotes the defense of human rights.
Among their services, they provide legal counsel for Spanish citizens that are deprived of their liberty abroad for drug trafficking felonies. During the past years, in addition to legal advice, they considered it important to develop prevention campaigns.
In this context we produced MULA, a short documentary, told in the protagonists’ voices, which narrates the story of 4 people who were arrested for drug trafficking. The proposal attempts to shed light on the consequences of these acts to prevent possible new cases.
DEVELOPMENT
During the development of this project, we had the chance to work together with the protagonists on the stories. For this project, we created a series of common questions which were asked to 4 interviewees, and later a single narrative was strung together. By way of the editing, we decided to unite the stories of the 4 protagonists into a single one, generating a parallelism in which all of them end up, in one way or another, suffering the same consequences.
To avoid victimization or sensationalism, we decided to work on the visual world by creating models and animating the characters of the short film.
Finally, we chose an anempathetic music score that was not redundant in violence or sadness. In this way, the music accompanied the rhythm of the narrative and allowed the viewer to get involved in a more logical, rather than emotional, way.
We carried this project out with Implicate for Fundación Abogacía during 2019. The short film had a private premiere and it will be soon distributed as part of the campaign’s plan.