Sport is growing at breakneck speed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but for young girls, sport is still something new, foreign and intimidating.

In the first ever Nike campaign for KSA, we wanted to inspire young girls to discover their inner potential and provide them with the confidence to begin their sport journey.

To visually portray the discovery of this hidden potential, we show our hero seamlessly traveling between two worlds: from everyday situations to sports action. We wanted to show that simple mundane actions can become sports skills, just like in this series of snappy social films:

To bring this story to life, we collaborated with Haifaa Al Mansour, who is regarded as the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia and one of the most significant cinematic figures in the country. Some of her films like Wadjda or The Perfect Canditate question the way women in Saudi Arabia are perceived and explore women’s issues in the region openly. Haifaa embraced the responsibility of representing the world she grew up in as authentically as possible to audiences at home and abroad, providing a window to KSA to people who have never had access to it before. You can read an interview with Haifaa about the project and her career here.

We worked with DOP Steve Annis to portray a modern Saudi Arabia.

Alongside the film shoot, we worked with photographer Madeleine Penfold to shoot a series of stills portraying young female Saudi girls that are local pioneers in different sports like gymnastics, football, skateboarding or swimming.

The entirety of the film was shot in Riyadh.
Our main hero performed all the sport actions herself: from bicycle kicks to gymnastics jumps!
Unfortunately, I missed the shoot and the opportunity to visit Saudi Arabia for the first time.

It was a pleasure to work with so many awesome and talented humans on this project. We spent good part of the post production in London working with Paul Hardcastle & Helena Teixeira at Trim and with George Kyriacou, Paul Wilmot, Holly Tidwell & team at Black Kite.

My favorite dinner of this production was at Dishoom, catching up with our W+K London awesome colleague Ankita Tobit. I especially enjoyed the Rose & Cardamom Lassi (had too many of those) and the Kulfi.

I worked on this project as an Art Director at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam with Dasha Ovechkina as Copywriter and Evgeny Primachenko & Guney Soykan as Creative Directors.