Look closely. What do you see? How about a little entertainment?

The campaign for the 15th annual Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival, taking place in Toronto November 8 to 17, invites people to take a closer look at mental health issues. The first poster in the series is a hand-drawn silkscreen by American artist A.J. Purdy that – spoiler alert! – obscures the tagline ‘You will see things differently.’

‘Once you really understand what somebody is experiencing, it does force you to see things differently, but you have to dig a bit deeper to find out what the truths are,’ says Glen Hunt, creative catalyst at Dentsu in Toronto. The festival organizers approached Dentsu to take on the pro bono campaign after seeing how far the agency managed to stretch the budget of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival earlier this year through the use of non-traditional media. Dentsu had also worked with the festival organizers years earlier to develop the original festival icon, a sketch of Sigmund Freud that appears on the posters.
The campaign will also include brochures and transit ads which drive traffic to the website, rendezvouswithmadness.com. Hunt says further ideas, such as cinema ads and a street theatre project, were put off till next year’s fest due to time constraints. A second poster execution of a paranoid note in which random letters are circled to reveal the message ‘I know your secrets’ will be out this month.

‘The whole goal behind it was to create posters that people would want to steal,’ says Hunt. ‘We wanted to support kleptomania.’


client: Lisa Brown, founder, Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival
agency: Dentsu Canada
creative catalyst: Glen Hunt
creative director: Les Soos
art directors: Boris Matas, Deborah Prenger, David Glen, Alex Rea
writer: Joe O’Neill

illustrator: A.J. Purdy
printing: Stacey Case, MerchGuy