We created the Unwanted Film Festival, the world’s largest film festival hiding in plain sight. But we needed to bring this problem out of hiding and shine a light on it. To make the world not only see the problem, but face it and talk about it.

To do that, we dragged it from its online hiding place and brought it to life offline. We stole the spotlight from one of the largest film festivals in the world and launched our experience on the doorstep of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

In 2021, 85 million suspected pieces of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) were found online. In the past year, this problem has grown at an alarming rate of one film or image uploaded every two seconds.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection is a leading voice in the fight against CSAM.

But how does one Winnipeg-based organization make people understand this global problem? How do we make them grasp this unfathomable number in order to shine a light on this unspoken epidemic and spur change? And how do we do it with no paid media budget?

We created The Unwanted Film Festival, the world's largest film festival, hiding in plain sight. 85 million films. 195 countries. Playing online. Everywhere.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection is a leading voice in the global fight against CSAM.

But how does this Winnipeg-based organization make people understand the global problem against which they fight every day? How do we make them grasp this unfathomable number in order to shine a light on this unspoken epidemic and spur change? And how do we do it with no paid media budget?

Film Fests bring films together from all over the world, and are celebrated with glitz, glamor and fanfare. Yet, online, there are more videos and images of CSAM than all the world’s film festivals combined. And no one is talking about them.

We’d force the conversation by launching the Unwanted Film Festival during one of the largest film festivals in the world: The Tribeca Film Fest in New York City.

To visualize the scale of the problem, we leveraged artificial intelligence to create an algorithm that generated 85 million film posters in real time, each translated into the six languages most-spoken around the world.

We launched The Unwanted Film Festival at one of the largest film fests in the world: the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. In an event space designed to look like a Festival theater, our multi-sensory experience enveloped Festival-goers with the AI-generated film posters via 3D projection mapping.

Festival goers could see the AI engine constructing each poster in real-time as the endless content came to life around them. Every two seconds, a new poster was streamed into the space and projected onto every surface. This deluge of haunting imagery was scored by an equally impactful soundscape designed to mimic the anxiety and fear felt by survivors.

The Unwanted Film Festival stole Tribeca’s spotlight. And the conversation:

Website traffic from 166 countries with most coming from India, Canada, US, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Nepal, Vietnam, Morocco and Algeria

Over 19,800 unique visitors the the campaign site

Thousands of petition signatures demanding tech companies stop the upload of known CSAM

50 million earned impressions

Featured on the New York times “The Daily” podcast

Sold out the immersive two-day experience and welcomed hundreds of visitors

Sparked crucial conversation with engagement from police forces, national media and celebrities

Visitors to the experience voiced its impact:

“It’s powerful to see and it’s impossible to imagine 85 million of these being created”

“I’m a teacher so I was deeply disturbed.”

“It’s riveting. It gets into your soul and even the atmosphere and the music it forces you to think.”

“It’s disgusting. What happens all around the world.”