Choose to Love More: a polemical anti-smoking campaign
26% of Europeans smoke, and smoking continues to be the largest single cause of preventable death and disease in the EU. 59% of smokers have tried to quit smoking, 20% succeeded.
Generally, smoking has decreased, but not as much as many organisations such as this had hoped for. This week, in the framework of the World No Tobacco Day, a Portuguese video campaign was released with the aim to reinvigorate the dialogue around smoking and reduce its prevalence among the Portuguese population aged 15 or above to less than 17% by 2020.
Maria is 40-years-old and is dying of lung cancer, yet she smokes as she always has. Melancholic on the day which is to be her last birthday, she sees her 8-years-old daughter, Beatriz, her pride and joy, mimicking her by pretending to smoke one of her cigarettes. Dealing with the fragilities of her last days, Maria is now burdened with the guilt that her actions have brought this idea to her daughter, and so she tries desperately to convince her daughter not to smoke, “Promise me you will always be a princess! And remember. A princess does not smoke!”.
This short film “Choose to Love More” is the basis for the 2018 National Campaign for Tobacco Prevention and Control in Portugal. Written by several students aged between 15 and 17 years, staring Portuguese actresses, Paula Neves, and directed by the internationally acclaimed film director André Badalo, this campaign wants you to think about this habit for what it is, bad. In particular, it wants women to consider their smoking habits and show them not only the negative impact of tobacco consumption but the future outcomes it has on their loved ones.
Why women? Every 50 minutes a Portuguese person died due to tobacco. Although men make up the majority of these smokers, their prevalence is decreasing – whereas women smokers have increased from 11.8% to 13.2%. So this campaign has decided that targeting these adverts towards women is a pragmatic step in dealing with the matter. Not only does smoking cause so many problems, but the added effects for women smokers, like for those using contraceptives it increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases, and of course, pregnant women and the damage to the child, mean that the specific issue needed attention.
A polemical anti-smoking campaign?
Surprisingly what provoked more reactions among Portuguese critics was the performance of the actresses and the script. “Promise me you will always be a princess! And remember. A princess does not smoke!”. This sentence is at the core of the discussion. Socialist MP Isabel Moreira described this video as misogynist. “I hope that the Ministry of Health withdraws the campaign, which is misogynist and blaming campaign for women,” she said.
