(Warning: This content features stories of sexual abuse and child sexual abuse material)
Who: The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P), with No Fixed Address for creative and UX development; Fort York, School Editing and Berkley Inc for post-production; plus NFA and Dini Von Mueffling Communications for PR.
What: “The Unwanted Film Festival,” a follow-up campaign to last year’s powerful “Unwanted Followers,” with the same objective of exerting pressure on the global tech giants to do more to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.
When & Where: This is a global campaign, launching today (June 15) with an immersive event in New York timed to coincide with the end of the Tribeca Film Festival. It also features wild postings mimicking film posters installed near Tribeca Film Festival cinemas. Posters will also be displayed in German at next week’s G7 conference in an attempt to reach political leaders. AI-generated fake posters are being displayed in English, French, Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish on a dedicated website, UnwantedFilmFest.com.
Why: More than 81 million suspected pieces of CSAM were found online in 2021, with one film or image uploaded every two seconds over the past year. It dwarfs the content of all the world’s film festivals combined, and its continued presence online can have a traumatizing effect for victims years after the initial abuse.
“Film festivals are something that are often thought of with glitz, glamour and celebration,” said NFA’s chief creative officer, Alexis Bronstorph. “Using this timely moment, we aim to draw people in with a familiar vehicle they know and understand to bring light to a truly horrific online epidemic that rages 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
How: The main campaign hub is a dedicated website, UnwantedFilmFest.com. The site uses artificial intelligence to create a fake movie poster every two seconds, representing each piece of CSAM posted online in that time period. It uses the actual words and sentiments of survivors to generate the titles and taglines, matching them with impactful but carefully curated images.
The immersive experience, meanwhile, presents the AI created film posters to visitors using 3D projection mapping to quickly cover the walls and floor.
And we quote: “We are now paying the price for decades of neglect and inaction from tech companies around the world—which has cost countless victims and survivors their safety, dignity, and privacy. The Unwanted Film Festival is a global wake-up call about the failures to adequately address the festering CSAM epidemic on the internet.” — Lianna McDonald, executive director, Canadian Centre for Child Protection
