La Pelota de Dios is a Cannes Silver Lion award winner in the Entertainment for Sport category. A project for Panenka magazine, with the idea of Ogilvy Social Lab, and produced by besweet_. with Mama Hungara Films as the service production company in Argentina. Directed by Matias Saravia and Larissa Cambauva.
When Ogilvy Social Lab told us about their idea of The ball of God Diego had just passed away. We had one week to produce and to share on Panenka's Social Media our tribute to the "10". It was a simple production design, apparently, but we we decided to make it bigger. We had to film in Argentina if we wanted this to get the strength that we were looking for and that the idea deserved. The Ogilvy team was very supportive from the first moment. In about six hours we had contacted an Argentinian producer, Saravia Payo, who had already filmed a whole movie in Villa Fiorito the previous year. He was our man to make Diego's tribute a reality in his own childhood home.
Producing this movie was an interesting exercise of worldwide collaboration. Bearing in mind that this was produced during the pandemic lockdown, it was more complicated to coordinate all the parts involved. On one hand we had the creatives in Amsterdam, creating the campaign and in constant communication with the client, Panenka. On the other hand, we had the director, Matias Sarabia, in Brasil, who had to fly to Buenos Aires in a time that flying was complicated. All supervised from the Production Company center base in Madrid. Showing an exemplar attitude and working with great synergy, we were able to pull off a project that would later win a Cannes Silver Lion.
Villa fiorito is not the safest place in the world to go film, really. Luckily we knew a guy who was a Boca Juniors supporter and was well known in the place. We also had a few military personnel to make sure nothing happened. But, in the end, we were filming a movie about Diego Maradona, and everyone in the village was happy that we were helping to keep El Diego's legacy alive.
