The Man Who Was Always Late, The Woman Who Can't Lie - REEL Canada | Clapboard Ad Archive

For Canada’s 150th anniversary, REEL Canada and Leo Burnett launched The Man Who Was Always Late, The Woman Who Can’t Lie — a campaign in the public service category that orchestrated a nationwide celebration of Canadian film culture through narrative-driven creative, robust out-of-home activations, and broad grassroots engagement for National Canadian Film Day 150. Anchored by two cinema spots developed with the participation of Canadian film industry icons, the narrative centerpiece The Man Who Was Always Late follows the everyday urgency of Abe Verma as he races to join what is heralded as the world’s largest film festival. Positioned squarely in what Clapboard’s taxonomy terms FORMAT#5—Exemplary Story, the campaign deploys a classic character arc in which lateness is no mere quirk, but a device to dramatize the essential, time-sensitive nature of collective cultural events, using Film Day itself as the narrative’s resolution and turning the event from a passive offering to a must-attend moment. This story-driven approach extends far beyond cinema, with Leo Burnett and REEL Canada engineering a tactile sense of national pride and presence through locally activated installations: public screening spaces, markers in everyday settings like the burger joint immortalized in Room, and literary integrations in Indigo bookstores via custom bookmarks that illuminate the books behind iconic films. Spanning March 23 to April 19 of the campaign year, these layered touchpoints invited participation not just from traditional moviegoers but from communities, students, diplomats, and the broader public, seamlessly blending top-down creative vision with bottom-up, lived experience of Canadian film. The communications strategy strikes a balance between high-art credibility and grassroots accessibility, underscoring that Canadian cinema is both made by and rooted in the country’s places, people, and histories. Clapboard rates this 70/100. By making the narrative power of the campaign inseparable from the product — National Canadian Film Day 150 itself — this work signals to the industry that event-led storytelling can meaningfully elevate shared cultural occasions into acts of national creative identity.