We are all too familiar with refugee images – refugees overflowing from little boats, refugees looking sad, refugees in teeming refugee camps. As with everything else, we get inured to it.

What’s outstanding about the films below is that each finds a different way in to this issue, and grabs our attention, engages and persuades.

 

ACNUR Argentina: 9 Years

ACNUR (UN Refugee Agency) Argentina takes a bleak anniversary, and with deft simplicity and economy, packs a powerful punch.

 

Help Refugees: #REFUGENES

An appropriate and clever use of celebrities – they’re not talking about someone else’s story, they’re talking about their own – turns the refugee story from one of sadness and desperation to one of hope and pride.

 

International Rescue Committee: What Would You Choose?

The contrast between our lucky lives and those of refugees from a war zone is wonderfully executed here.

Vluchtelingenwerk Vlaanderen: #621drowned

Anger is very hard to harness for communications purposes. This pulls it off.

 

The Light Pin Project

The project itself is such a brilliant idea (literally), and this is an object lesson in how to make your case in under 2 minutes.

Hope is a marketing, creative and branding agency for charities and other social-purpose organisations. The Ideas Lab examines what makes effective (or ineffective) communications for these causes, charities and social-impact businesses.