fidh and We Are Social France launched 'I Leave Burundi' in May 2018, a two-phase film campaign that disguised refugee testimonies as a tourism promotion to
ARCHIVEHow fidh Exposed Burundi's Refugee Crisis Through a Fake Tourism Campaign
fidh's 'I Leave Burundi' is a 2018 public service film campaign created by We Are Social France that disguised refugee testimonies inside a polished tourism promotion to expose political repression in Burundi and challenge the government's portrayal of the country as peaceful and stable.
Launched on 15 May 2018 in France, the campaign operated in two deliberate phases, according to fidh.org. The first phase, titled 'I Love Burundi', ran between 7 and 15 May 2018 through a fictitious identity called the Agency for the Promotion of Tourism in Burundi. This fake agency distributed upbeat social content and tourism-focused film presenting Burundi as a destination of natural beauty and warmth. The voices narrating that film belonged, in reality, to Burundian opponents who had fled the country and were living in exile. When the second phase launched under the title 'I Leave Burundi', the mask was removed entirely. The same voices reappeared, now identified as refugees, their words recontextualised to reveal the repression, fear, and displacement that had forced them to leave.
The campaign launched at a precise political moment. Burundi held a constitutional referendum on 17 May 2018 — two days after the campaign's full reveal — a vote that risked consolidating the power of President Pierre Nkurunziza, according to fidh.org. Between April 2015 and 6 May 2018, the ITEKA League recorded 1,710 killings, 486 enforced disappearances, 558 torture victims, and 8,561 arbitrary arrests, per fidh.org. Approximately 430,000 people had fled Burundi following the political crisis triggered in 2015 when President Nkurunziza announced his intention to seek a constitutionally disputed third term, also per fidh.org. In France, where fidh is headquartered and where international human rights advocacy carries particular institutional weight, the campaign targeted media, policymakers, and the broader public simultaneously. The campaign's French-language tagline — 'Alors, si le Burundi est si beau, pourquoi 400 000 personnes ont-elles été contraintes de partir?' — translated the political argument into a single unanswerable question.
fidh built the 'I Leave Burundi' strategy on a fundamental insight: audiences conditioned to ignore humanitarian appeals are far less resistant to content that does not announce itself as advocacy. We Are Social France designed the two-phase structure precisely to exploit that gap between reception and revelation. By the time viewers encountered the second film, they had already invested emotionally in the voices of the first — voices they had assumed belonged to cheerful tourism ambassadors, according to wearesocial.com.
The campaign extended a lineage of Burundi-focused advocacy work. A first viral awareness campaign by fidh and We Are Social had preceded this effort in 2016, per clapboard.com, establishing a collaborative model between the human rights organisation and the social-first agency. The 2018 iteration refined that approach by embedding the narrative deception into the campaign's architecture rather than relying on conventional shock tactics deployed by competitors in the humanitarian communications space. Organisations such as Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières have historically used imagery-led urgency to drive awareness; fidh and We Are Social chose structural misdirection instead, allowing the audience's own assumptions to generate the emotional impact.
In France, the public service and nonprofit communications sector operates within a media environment where digital video and social platforms have become dominant channels for advocacy reach. The campaign's deployment through social media, under a fabricated agency identity, reflected We Are Social's core competency as a social-first creative agency, according to wearesocial.com. The timing was not incidental. Anchoring the reveal to the eve of Burundi's constitutional referendum gave the campaign genuine news value, elevating it beyond a creative exercise into a piece of international political communications designed to apply pressure at a moment of consequence.
The creative execution of 'I Leave Burundi' depended entirely on the quality of its disguise. We Are Social France produced the first film, 'I Love Burundi', to the visual and tonal standard of a credible national tourism campaign — a requirement that demanded genuine craft discipline, since any perceptible gap in production quality would have undermined the deception before it could function, according to wearesocial.com.
The campaign credits, as documented by wearesocial.com and adstasher.com, identify Kentin Denoyelle and Sandrine Plasseraud as key figures within the We Are Social France team on this campaign. Thomas Guilhoutp and Vincent Reynaud-Lacroze are also credited in connection with the project. The decision to cast actual Burundian exiles as the voices of both films gave the narrative its documentary authenticity. These were not actors performing displacement — they were people describing a reality they had lived, which meant the emotional register of the second film carried a weight that scripted performances could not have replicated.
The fictitious Agency for the Promotion of Tourism in Burundi served as the campaign's central creative construct, per fidh.org. Building a complete fake institutional identity — with its own name, visual language, and social presence — required creative and strategic coordination across disciplines. The shift between phases was engineered so that the recontextualisation of familiar voices in the second film would function as the campaign's primary creative device rather than any visual shock or explicit imagery. The single media asset at the heart of the campaign archive contains the essential argument: the same country, the same voices, two entirely different truths. In France, where the campaign circulated within a media-literate, politically engaged audience, that structural ambiguity was both the creative risk and the communicative reward.
ARCHIVENo independently verified performance data for the 'I Leave Burundi' campaign — including reach figures, video views, or petition signatures — is publicly available from primary sources consulted for this analysis. Trade press coverage in Ad Age, Adweek, Campaign, The Drum, and Contagious yielded no independently verifiable metrics, according to clapboard.com's research findings.
What is verifiable is the campaign's award recognition. 'I Leave Burundi' won the Grand Prix Stratégies du Brand Content in the Brand Content category in 2018, as confirmed by We Are Social's own awards summary and the record held by the Association of Communication Consulting Agencies. The Grand Prix Stratégies is among France's most significant trade honours in the brand content discipline, and its award to a public service campaign — rather than a commercial advertiser — reflects the jury's assessment of the work's structural originality.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on the integrity of its two-phase sequencing. The deception functions only if the first film earns genuine audience trust, and the reveal functions only if the second film refuses sentimentality in favour of factual recontextualisation. Both conditions appear to have been met based on the creative evidence available. The timing relative to Burundi's constitutional referendum gave the campaign a built-in mechanism for earned media amplification that purely humanitarian messaging typically lacks. Clapboard scores 'I Leave Burundi' at 54 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's genuine strategic ingenuity and precise timing while acknowledging the limited public documentation of its measurable reach and the constraints inherent in a single-asset deployment.
fidh's 'I Leave Burundi' is a 2018 public service film campaign created in France by We Are Social France. It used a fake tourism promotion called 'I Love Burundi' to disguise refugee testimonies, then revealed those voices belonged to Burundian exiles in a second film exposing political repression.
fidh and We Are Social used a fictitious Agency for the Promotion of Tourism in Burundi to lower audience resistance to advocacy messaging. Audiences who engaged with the tourism film without knowing its origin were more emotionally receptive when the refugee reality was subsequently revealed in the campaign's second phase.
The campaign launched on 15 May 2018, two days before Burundi's constitutional referendum on 17 May 2018, per fidh.org. That referendum risked consolidating President Pierre Nkurunziza's power. Anchoring the reveal to that political moment gave the campaign immediate news relevance and maximised its potential for media amplification in France.
'I Leave Burundi' won the Grand Prix Stratégies du Brand Content in the Brand Content category in 2018. This is confirmed by We Are Social's awards summary and the Association of Communication Consulting Agencies agency record. The Grand Prix Stratégies is one of France's leading trade honours in the brand content discipline.
Key figures credited on the 'I Leave Burundi' campaign at We Are Social France include Kentin Denoyelle, Sandrine Plasseraud, Thomas Guilhoutp, and Vincent Reynaud-Lacroze, according to wearesocial.com and adstasher.com. The campaign was produced for client fidh, the International Federation for Human Rights, and published in France in May 2018.
Approximately 430,000 people fled Burundi following the 2015 political crisis, per fidh.org. Between April 2015 and 6 May 2018, the ITEKA League recorded 1,710 killings, 486 enforced disappearances, 558 torture victims, and 8,561 arbitrary arrests, also per fidh.org. fidh's campaign tagline directly referenced this displacement figure.
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