At Christmas the grocery store PENNY also tends to the emotional needs of its customers. At our stores, all opinions, people and their disputes meet. PENNY is the neighborhood store that stands for closeness and community. So, this year’s Christmas message speaks from the heart of the brand.

The biggest challenge was to create authentic and relatable scenes, and to avoid superficial box-ticking of current societal divisions. Additionally, we didn’t want to decide what’s “wrong” or “right”. While we aimed to develop a look that shows the depression and division people are experiencing, we also wanted to provide a message that moves people.

In our film, one conflict follows the next – authentically and effortlessly we portray every major topic. To achieve that, it was crucial to not only be able to relate to each conflict but also to the cast itself. Faces that you can see yourself in and that reflect our society. Especially the two main actors showed their full potential from fury, sadness and sensitivity already in the casting calls. With their performance they accomplish to make us feel this brokenness, which those conflicts leave us with. We relive the last few years of dividedness in only four minutes, emotionally climaxing in hope and the sentence: “Can we talk?”.

The final climax of the film leads to a very simple but often not easy solution: “Can we talk?”. With that we touched millions across the country.

After a few days we hit 20 Mio. views and counted 43.000 interactions. We received loads of positive feedback such as “this should be a message from the government” or “as every year right on point of the Zeitgeist”. The community also recognizes themselves and admits: “It’s time to reach out to each other and talk.”