BRAC | SPACE ON EARTH

In 2019, over 1 million Rohingya Muslims, 500,000 of them children, were exiled from their homeland in Myanmar and forced to seek refuge in Cox’s Bazaar in south-eastern Bangladesh. The Bangladesh-based NGO BRAC, Ogilvy & Mather Singapore and Outsider TV asked us to help signal-boost the message from the Rohingya children: “Why is there no space on Earth for us?”

We modified a CRT TV set to show clips from heart-breaking interviews with these children, intending to launch it from Cox’s Bazaar, the world’s largest refugee camp. Due to proximity to Myanmar and the risk of travelling into their airspace, we launched from Bogra, but visited the camp to conduct a series of tethered launches and combining the footage to maintain the clarity of the message.

Operating in a refugee camp in Bangladesh was a huge technical challenge. Without the infrastructure we unthinkingly rely on in industrialised nations, acquiring gas, filling the balloon and regulating the temperature of the camera equipment all required rapid field adjustments to our process to secure the result.