Brave Heart Fund's 2017 Lebanon campaign Interview with an Undertaker used a documentary social experiment to spotlight congenital heart disease in children
ARCHIVEBrave Heart Fund Uses an Undertaker to Fight Congenital Heart Disease
Brave Heart Fund's 2017 Lebanon campaign, "Interview with an Undertaker," is a single-film public service initiative produced in documentary and social-experiment format that confronts viewers with the fatal consequences of untreated congenital heart disease in children, using the figure of an undertaker as a symbol of what happens when surgical funding is absent.
The Brave Heart Fund is a charitable fundraising initiative established in November 2003 at the Children's Heart Center at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC). It is operated entirely by volunteers whose lives have been shaped by congenital heart disease, and its founding mission is unambiguous: no child should die of heart disease because of a lack of funds. The Fund works to cover the cost of surgeries and hospitalization for children in Lebanon whose families cannot meet those costs.
Published in Lebanon in March 2017, the campaign carries a proposition that cuts straight to consequence. By placing an undertaker — a professional whose existence is defined by finality — at the centre of a filmed interview, the work forces a conversation about what happens when charitable funding does not reach a child in time. The undertaker is not a metaphor deployed casually; in a Lebanese cultural context, the figure carries the full weight of irreversibility. The campaign contains one media asset, a single film, and was created for Brave Heart Fund by Impact BBDO Beirut. The Clapboard Score for "Interview with an Undertaker" is 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign whose creative provocation is clear and whose cause carries genuine urgency, even in the absence of publicly verified effectiveness metrics.
ARCHIVEBrave Heart Fund operates in one of the most emotionally demanding categories in public service advertising: childhood illness requiring costly surgical intervention. The strategic challenge in Lebanon is not simply awareness — congenital heart disease is not an unknown condition — but urgency and financial mobilisation. The Fund's creative partners at Impact BBDO Beirut chose to make the cost of inaction tangible rather than abstract, and that decision defines the entire strategic architecture of "Interview with an Undertaker."
The campaign's market strategy leverages a stark, emotionally charged creative angle by featuring an interview with a practising undertaker, a figure who represents the endpoint that charitable funding is designed to prevent. Rather than showing a child recovering after surgery — the affirmative outcome most charitable campaigns default to — this approach begins at the other end of the story. It is a structurally confrontational choice, and one that reflects a mature understanding of donor psychology: audiences who have grown accustomed to hopeful charity narratives may be more durably moved by a frank reckoning with failure.
In Lebanon, where the healthcare system serves a population navigating layered economic pressures, the gap between medical necessity and financial accessibility is a lived reality for many families. According to himaya.org, child welfare and protection organisations in Lebanon operate within a context of significant resource constraints, making privately funded initiatives such as the Brave Heart Fund structurally important to the country's paediatric care landscape. The Fund's positioning as a direct bridge between a child's surgical need and the funds required to meet it is not aspirational language — it is the operational reality the campaign is built to serve. "Interview with an Undertaker" weaponises that reality by giving it a face, and that face belongs to the professional who steps in when the bridge is never crossed.
"Interview with an Undertaker" is executed in a documentary and social-experiment format, a production register that lends the film the texture of observed reality rather than constructed advertising.
The film centres on an interview with an undertaker — a professional engaged in conversation about their work. The specificity of that choice is the creative engine of the entire piece. By presenting a figure whose professional existence is inseparable from death, and by conducting what appears to be a candid, unscripted or semi-scripted interview, the film creates a sense of documentary authenticity that a conventionally produced charity advertisement could not achieve. The undertaker's words, framed within the context of children dying from congenital heart disease for want of surgical funding, transform an occupational interview into a moral confrontation. The on-screen scenario is a contained, interview-based encounter that gains its force from restraint — from what is implied about children who do not receive treatment — rather than from dramatic reconstruction.
The creative team responsible for this execution was assembled by Impact BBDO Beirut. Senior Creative Director Angelo El Chami oversaw the campaign, with Creative Director Georges Kyrillos leading the creative development. Digital Creative Director Chris Jabre contributed to the campaign's execution, copywriter Mohamed Mokaddem shaped the written dimension of the work, and Agency Producer Rawad Keyrouz managed production. According to linkedin.com, Georges Kyrillos held the Creative Director role at Impact BBDO during the period spanning 2017 to 2019, placing his tenure directly across the production of this campaign. The decision to pursue a documentary register rather than a scripted narrative reflects a wider trend in public interest filmmaking in Lebanon and across the region, where earned authenticity has become a distinguishing creative value in campaigns asking audiences to part with money for a cause.
"Interview with an Undertaker" received a Silver Lynx in the Online Film category at the Dubai Lynx in March 2017, according to clapboard.com. The Dubai Lynx is the region's most prominent creative advertising awards competition, and a Silver in Online Film represents meaningful peer recognition for a single-asset public service film produced in Lebanon for a volunteer-run charitable fund.
No verified sales lift, donation increase, or effectiveness metrics for the campaign are publicly available. No budget or media spend data has been confirmed in any public source. The campaign's listing records 2,159 views and 10 likes on the platform where it is archived, figures that reflect the modest organic reach typical of a single-film public service asset without documented paid distribution behind it.
What the structural evidence does support is that the campaign's creative strategy is coherent and its risk is deliberate. Beginning a charity film with a conversation about death rather than a story of recovery is a calculated inversion, and the Silver Lynx result suggests that regional creative juries found the execution sufficiently distinguished to reward it. No verified recognition was found across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC for this campaign. Within the Brave Heart Fund's documented campaign lineage — which includes "This Is Not a Film" in 2014 to 2015, "Born Today" in 2019, and "Badda Aleb" in 2020, as recorded on braveheartfund.org — "Interview with an Undertaker" represents a consistent commitment to high-contrast, emotionally forceful public service communication executed in the film medium.
Interview with an Undertaker is a 2017 public service film from Lebanon created by Impact BBDO Beirut for Brave Heart Fund. The campaign uses a documentary interview with an undertaker to highlight what happens when children with congenital heart disease cannot access surgery due to a lack of charitable funding, making the cost of inaction concrete and irreversible.
Impact BBDO Beirut created the campaign. The core creative team included Senior Creative Director Angelo El Chami, Creative Director Georges Kyrillos, Digital Creative Director Chris Jabre, copywriter Mohamed Mokaddem, and Agency Producer Rawad Keyrouz. The campaign was published in Lebanon in March 2017 on behalf of the Brave Heart Fund.
The campaign won a Silver Lynx in the Online Film category at the Dubai Lynx in March 2017, according to clapboard.com. No verified recognition has been found at Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC for this specific campaign.
Brave Heart Fund is a charitable fundraising initiative established in November 2003 at the Children's Heart Center at the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Lebanon. Operated by volunteers, its mission is to ensure no child dies of congenital heart disease because of insufficient funds, covering surgery and hospitalization costs for needy children.
The documentary and social experiment format lends the film the credibility of observed reality rather than constructed advertising. Featuring a practising undertaker in a candid interview setting makes the consequences of untreated childhood heart disease feel immediate and factual, a deliberate creative inversion designed to move Lebanese audiences beyond passive awareness toward active charitable response.
Interview with an Undertaker holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign with clear creative provocation and a well-defined charitable mission centred on congenital heart disease in Lebanon, balanced against the absence of publicly verified effectiveness or donation metrics and limited documented media reach beyond its single film asset.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
