Congratulations to new—land director Marcus Ibanez, who this week won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Film Direction for 'The Wish', his film for German supermarket chain Penny via Serviceplan Munich. The film was one of more than 1,700 entries in the Film Craft category and represents the first Film Craft Lions Grand Prix win for a German agency.
The three-and-a-half-minute film cinematically expresses a mother’s grief at the lost experiences her son has suffered at the hands of the Covid-19 pandemic. Joining his mother in the kitchen for a late-night snack, he asks “Can’t sleep either?” “No,” she replies. When he asks what she wants for Christmas, a look of concealed heartache crosses her face. “I wish you wouldn’t hang out at home all the time,” she says. “That you’d sneak out at night…and we wouldn’t know where you were. I wish your dad would have to pick you up because you drank way too much.”
Within a week of the film's launch it had garnered 4m organic views on YouTube, a figure that has since risen to more than 17.4m.
'The Wish' won a Grand Prix in Film Craft: Direction, as well as three Golds, in Cinematography, Use of Music, and Script. Jury President Patrick Milling-Smith said, "We awarded the Grand Prix to a film that is almost a throwback to classic filmmaking and had to be so perfectly crafted on every level to truly resonate and work. In the wrong hands a film like this could have been lost to over sentimentality, or victim to a few false notes, but it is in fact perfectly complete and the obvious work of a filmmaker in utter command of his craft."
