REFRAME THE CITY
Imagine when the stories you hear from the poorest communities are not driven by the voices of big NGOs, media outlets and powerful authorities, but the people in those communities. This is what we did with Reframe The City, a project developed and produced for Plan International. Along with an interactive multimedia platform, we trained young people in slum communities in seven countries around the world to report their stories with photography and use it in multiple forms to amplify their voices both locally as well as globally.
DREAMTOWN
Our consulting work with Dreamtown focusses on shaping a new form of modern NGO, that operates with storytelling in its core, not only for external communication, but also internally inside the organisation to lower the friction between different stakeholders in projects and focus on the universal language everyone speaks and understands. The external communication we develop is therefor also less focused on a campaign approah, but more on creating fragmented documentarian narratives of long periods of time as one of the three pillars of the organisation – research, action & stories.
MØN SESSIONS
A music and storytelling project in its core, Møn Sessions, run together with fellow filmmaker and local resident Emile Carlsen, is a creative playground to test out new ideas. Once a month we invite exceptional artists to the danish island of Møn and record live music sessions out in nature, no matter the time of year or weather, and produce videos that build a hybrid combination of live music, music video and art. In addition, several times a year we tell short stories of the residents on the island, combining interesting characters and new approaches to short form documentary.
DARE TO TRY
A seaming unfullfillable dream and a lot of ambition to reach it, that is what Marta Hughes had, when she set out to climb Chimborazo, the furthest point from the center of the earth and, with 6268 meters above sealevel, the highest mountain in Ecuador. With little to no serious climbing experience and being afraid of heights, Marta had more to overcome than just the physical challenge, in her effort to raise money for SOS Children’s Villages through her climb. Simon followed her whole journey for the documentary Dare To Try from the training in the alps to the highest peaks in Ecuador.
COLD AT HOME
Energy poverty is a complex topic affecting 100 million people aross Europe and Northern America alone. For the Energy Action Project together with Poul Madsen, Simon travelled across Europe to investigate the aspect of fuel poverty. Cold at Home, one of the resulting films, goes into the story of three people, displaced by the war in Eastern Ukraine, trying to create a new home, while struggeling with rising fuel prices and inadeqate housing. The film won the Danish Picture of the Year Award for Long Form Documentary.
HUMANS
The fragmented multimedia narrative HUMANS is the result of a more than 15.000 kilometer long journey from Capetown, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt with public transport, exploring the human condition through a series of documentary portraits and conversations with people about life, struggles, happiness and dreams on the Afrian continent. The resulting body of work was exhibited and published in various forms online and offline and resulted in a book. HUMANS will be re-published online later this year, inluding yet unpublished stories.
CLEAN ENERGY IS LIFE
Smoke kills 4.3 million people every year due to open fire cooking in the developing world. Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL), an initiative by the United Nations, aims to speeden up the process of reaching the sustainable development goal 7 – access to sustainable energy for everyone and reach it by 2030. For their campaign Clean Energy Is Life, we developed and produced the creative concept. The 30 second PSA premiered at the General Assembly of the United Nations to kick off a conference on sustainable energy with leaders in the energy sector.
A THIN LINE
Every day 830 women die from pregnency or child birth related complications. Most of these deaths happen in the developing world due to inadequate access to health care. A Thin Line tells the story of two women in Ghana, who survived, telling their story and how their survival not only affected them, but also their families and communities. The film was co-directed together with filmmaker Yann Verbeke for the World Health Organisation to accompany a report on the topic to create a different narrative, focused more on the positive impact access to health care has, not only for the individuum, but the whole community.