New Year’s video about single mom sparks controversy online

Santa Claus, snow, requests to the main winter wizard. Lovely and nothing more. But not at this time. A large bank’s marketers decided to shoot an instructive New Year’s video. “New Year and Christmas is the time when it is worth thinking about the main thing – to be close to loved ones, enjoy the comfort of home, and leave financial matters to professionals,” the creators write in the annotation to the video.

More than 700 thousand people have already watched the video “New Year’s Story”. The estimates differed: 2 thousand dissatisfied versus 4 thousand who liked the video. They say that there were comments. But we could not read them – the owners of the video blocked the ability to leave reviews to it. What’s the matter?

Here’s what. In the center of the plot is a young woman, the mother of an eight-year-old girl. Mom is a successful businesswoman. This is judging by the chic house where they live with their daughter, and by the number of things the girl has that would make any child happy: from a tablet to a segway on which she rides along the corridors of their giant house. And it doesn’t seem that all this luxury and well-being is my father’s merit. There is no dad in this video at all. And there is not a single mention of him either. And mom plows from dawn to dawn, leaving the girl to a nanny. Well, sometimes she barks at her daughter, who, despite the presence of her huge room, settles down to paint on the floor in the corridor.

Eight-year-old Alice’s eyes are filled with longing. She lacks the main thing in her life – her mother’s attention. And she writes a letter to Santa Claus with a request to give her her mother.

Santa Claus responds to the request: he kidnaps a woman, drags her along with him on a rope through forests, swamps, fields and mountains. Leads her, exhausted and bloody, to the forest river. By that time, the woman had already come to terms with her position. He even worries about his kidnapper when his heart sank. Although, maybe she just realizes that without him she will not get out of the thicket?

As a result, she realizes that the main thing in life is not career, not money and not well-being. And communication with my daughter. And everything immediately became good for them.

The clip took a lot of effort and, it seems, money: the shooting took place in Russia and Georgia, the director of the project is one of the best in his field, the soundtrack was recorded with the participation of the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra SIF 309, a multiple Oscar nominee. She told about all this on her page in Facebook Nadezhda Levashova, marketing director of that very bank. And she received a good dose of indignation in the comments.

“This is something beyond good and evil. Abduction, torture of a working single mother … Here’s a New Year’s tale for you. By the way, all my childhood was spent in poverty, my mother worked two jobs, my father risked his life in the 90s, doing coal … At the age of 7, I took my younger sister from kindergarten and cooked dinner for the whole family. And I saw my mother only on weekends. And my working mother is the best mother in the world. Parents gave us everything, while lifting us to our feet in times of famine. We didn’t see them, but we understood everything ”, – one of the responseswhich triggered the video after watching.

“It’s disgusting. In the 21st century, to show violence against women (there are moments in the video that in real life would fall under the Criminal Code), to show working women in this light. Is this a video about the infliction of “good” (?) By violence? Is this what you call creating a New Year’s mood? What did you want to say with this video? ” – users write.

Nadezhda Levashova tried to explain:

“I will now comment not as a bank representative or marketing director, but as a person. I’m a working mother, and you yourself admitted that I know what I’m doing in marketing. I would not accept the idea if I considered it offensive to a woman, to myself. The idea was different – we often substitute values, trying to give children more, a better education, a better life, deprive them of their attention by giving time to work. And the child is not important about wealth, but attention. We propose to think about this ”.

Nadezhda failed to convince the shocked users.

“There is no message about attention at all. There is no background, no characters, there is only violence against a woman, which occupies 80% of the video. A big budget is visible. A great desire to show something in a Western way, beautifully, with a claim for a prize, for discussion. But the emotions in this video – they are strange, negative, you do not understand what is happening, you do not see the lesson that this woman has learned, and why she should learn it through violence – is also incomprehensible. Yes, and no one thought about the girl – the mother was absent for several weeks (apparently), Santa Claus and the girl were sentenced to humiliation – to ask for food from the neighbors, etc. Roughly speaking, it’s all about the script that hasn’t gone through a major overhaul. As a result – stereotypes, negative emotions, anger, and questions about logic, “viewers believe.