Muharrem, a hearing-impaired man from Turkey, leaves his apartment on Dec. 28, 2014, with his sister Ozlem, thinking it would be just another day. But unknown to Muharrem, he was being filmed as the central participant in an elaborately organized ad with the heartwarming slogan, “A world without barriers is our dream.”
Filming of the ad was organized by the mobile phone company Samsung in Turkey, as part of a publicity campaign to promote the company’s new video call service for the hearing impaired.
The video begins with Muharrem and his sister, who was part of the plan to surprise Muharrem, setting out from their home in the morning. As they walk through the streets, Muharrem’s astonishment and bewilderment grows when he meets people, mostly strangers, who communicate with him in sign language. Unknown to him, all had previously agreed to learn and use sign language phrases for their specific roles in the ad.
When the first person he meets signs “good morning,” Muharrem looks surprised and actually glances back at the person wonderingly. But he gets over his surprise about the first incident, probably imagining it was only an isolated occurrence.
But watch Muharrem’s astonishment grow into bewilderment and finally utter confusion as the shopkeeper, a taxi driver and finally an electronic billboard speak to him in the language he understands but which everyone refuses to learn.
First he visits a store where the shopkeeper surprises him by offering hot bagels using sign language. Soon after, he encounters a clumsy stranger who drops a bag of apples. When he helps the stranger pick up the fruits, the man says “thank you” by offering an apple in sign language.
While struggling to make sense of the series of unlikely coincidences as he walks along with his sister, a woman bumps into him. She apologizes immediately in sign language, saying, “Sorry, my mistake.”
Already confused about the sudden radical transformation of his normally uncommunicative world, Muharrem appears shocked when an exuberant driver greets him as he enters a cab, saying “hi, there,” in sign language.
After the taxi dropped him and his sister at a public square, several people greet them in sign language.
By the time that a woman appears on an electronic billboard with the message in sign language, “because a world without barriers is our dream as well,” Muharrem must have either realized that he was an unwitting participant in a stunt of some sort or concluded he was going crazy with hallucinations of a different world of his dreams.
But a friend rescues him just in time, pointing to the cameras set up discreetly around him. When he learns that he had been participating in a stunt set up by Samsung, in which so many people learned some sign language just to communicate with him, Muharrem is overwhelmed and breaks into tears.
You need to put yourself in the shoes of a hearing-impaired person and connect empathetically with Muharrem who has struggled with the handicap of communication barrier for years to understand why he broke down in tears after a brief experience of a communicative social environment
According to Digital Synopsis, Samsung’s video call program in Turkey allows hearing-impaired people to communicate with loved ones.
Samsung teamed up with an ad agency called Leo Burnett, Istanbul, and it took a month to prepare for the filming of the video. The preparation involved several residents of Istanbul attending sign language classes taken by an expert, and technicians secretly installing cameras around the city to capture Muharrem’s reactions to the unexpected.
Although the video was filmed in December, 2014, it was posted to YouTube for the first time on March 3. The video has been viewed more than five million times since it was uploaded to YouTube by DigitalSynopsis.com
