VICKS // ONE IN A MILLION

THE STORY

This is the 2nd film of the Touch of Care platform for India, in which we tell the story of Nisha Lobo and her parents Aloma & David Lobo.

We wanted to talk about disabled orphans after finding that incredible number that only between 30 and 45 disabled children are adopted, each year, in India. Which is crazy in a country of more than a billion.

The original script was based on someone else’s story that we had found through our personal connections. Unfortunately, that person decided to withdraw just a couple weeks before the beginning of the shoot, for personal reasons.

We had to try our luck by sending our script to Aloma Lobo whom we knew had been in charge of the Central Adoption Resource Authority in India, to ask if, in her long career, she had heard of any similar extraordinary story of adoption.

We soon realised that Aloma, herself, was the story. She and husband David adopted Nisha, an abandoned girl born with ichthyosis, and raised her as their own, with their other 5 children.

There was a lot of speculation, after the first film, on whether we could create the same kind of emotion for our audience. With additional pressure from our clients who wanted us to prove that last time wasn't just a happy little accident.

Thankfully, it worked out fine and we could keep our head up high for a little longer.

We ended up with around 40 million views (that we could track, it got massively shared on WhatsApp too and we couldn’t follow that side) in 2 weeks.

THE AFTERMATH

The film garnered a lot of attention, due to expectations following the previous one. There were numerous articles written about it, social media reposts, and it rapidly became a worldwide staple of the "Youtube Reaction Channels" circuit.

People from all over the world filmed themselves watching and reacting to Nisha’s story, following with heartfelt discussions on the topic of adoption and disabled children.

I you feel like going through them all on youtube, there’s a looot of them.

FOR ALOMA & NISHA

What was an even happier outcome, was that countless couples from all over the world contacted Aloma to give their support and to ask for help starting the procedure to adopt disabled children themselves.

The film is now also used by several adoption agencies in India to present prospective parents with a positive story and introduce them to what it is to love a child who isn't their own and the kind of work and responsibility that comes with it.

Nisha was offered to host her own TED Talk, to present her views on how people should treat visibly disabled people and some of the challenges she's had to face through life.

She was also invited to several shows to discuss her life and talk about her experience of being adopted.

Today, she’s in her mid twenties, enjoying her life surrounded by her ever-loving family.

WORLDWIDE RECEPTION

There was an amazing response, both locally and internationally, which helped give the campaign the resonance that we hoped for. We did expect less than for Gauri’s story as our topic wasn’t as "sensational" and within the global Zeitgeist but the overall international response was still pretty impressive, with countless articles, TV mentions, conferences, online discussions, and more, on it.

We also won a bunch of awards at most of the major festivals.