Voskhod Make Film Made by Diabetics for Accu-Check

Russian agency Voskhod and glucometer makers Accu-Check have teamed up to create a short film fully starring and produced by people with diabetes or their caregivers, highlighting how diabetes is something you live with, not suffer from.

In Made by Diabetics, produced by SKBD.SH, a social housing complex is the setting for a short film about creativity, destruction, frustrations, and the ordinary lives of those who live in the building, chosen to be representative of the housing most of Russia still lives in.

The ad is about a lot of things, essentially, but one thing it is not directly about is diabetes. A brief scene does feature a man using an Accu-Check glucometer, but for the most part the disease does not feature, as fits the aim of showing that diabetes is not an ailment that has to define someone or their lifestyle.

As Accu-Check marketing director Maria Molchanova put it, before this ad, 'typical glucometer advertising purely demonstrated the product’s functionality, but left out the most important point, the people with diabetes.' Following an intensive research period among the cast and crew, then, the film was developed, with an over-arching narrative described by copywriters Daria Ovechkina and Anton Rozhin as, 'darkness to light: this film is a journey out of that darkness [diabetes] and into a wonderful and inspirational light full of motivation and hope.'

They also made the crucial decision to make the credits as much a part of the film as the filom itself. With each credit, we see that person's diabetes status, highlighting the humanity behind the disease. In this, it takes inspiration from notable 1970 short Necrology by Standish Lauder, a film of people ascending an escalator, with the credit role revealing the things that separate them from each other, be they professions, secrets, or life experiences.