Through the Eyes of a Refugee - Amnesty International | Clapboard Ad Archive

Through the Eyes of a Refugee from Amnesty International and TBWA Netherlands stands apart as a Public Service campaign that seeks to collapse the emotional distance between Western European audiences and the lived realities of refugees by employing an arresting creative device: hypnosis as a conduit for radical empathy. Released in 2018, the film orchestrates a controlled experiment in which five Dutch and Belgian participants, under the care of a professional hypnotherapist, are guided through the traumatic journey of Marwa, a 29-year-old Syrian woman forced to flee her homeland for the Netherlands. Rather than literalizing or restaging the refugee experience, the campaign leverages what Clapboard's taxonomy would classify as FORMAT#3—Symbolize the Problem—using hypnosis as a vivid metaphor for the transfer of emotion, memory, and perspective beyond the barriers of language, politics, or cultural distance. This approach replaces didactic narrative with embodied experience, bypassing traditional documentary techniques in favor of a creative risk that asks the audience to consider not just what refugees endure but how it feels in the moment of crisis. The decision to stage the experiment in English reflects Amnesty International's drive for accessibility and global resonance, extending the relevance of a Dutch story to an international audience. TBWA's execution never sensationalizes trauma; instead, it reframes the refugee story as something that could, under different circumstances, be the story of any viewer, subverting preconceived notions and inviting a more universal sense of responsibility. With the campaign earning an 82/100 in Clapboard's global creative archive, it stands as a sharp example of how public interest communication can move beyond advocacy-by-statistic to deliver something emotionally indelible. For an industry tested by empathy fatigue and audience desensitization, this work signals that symbolic, immersive devices can reignite compassion and redefine what witness means in the context of humanitarian storytelling.