How Google’s Reunion Made A Search Box Feel Like A Border Crossing
Google’s Reunion put a search box inside a story about Partition, and published it on 13 November 2013. The three-minute film follows a granddaughter using search to find her grandfather’s childhood friend on the other side of the border.
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather India, written by Sukesh Kumar Nayak
Directed by Amit Sharma, produced by Chrome Pictures
Director of photography: Tassaduq Hussain
Music by Clinton Cerejo, lyrics by Neelesh Jain, sung by Piyush Mishra
Shot in Delhi, including a haveli in Connaught Place, the Red Fort and India Gate, with a scene filmed in Lahore
The Brief Behind Reunion
Nayak has described the problem the brand team set: Google was a great technology brand that nobody used for anything more than hunting information. The task was to show what the product meant in a life rather than what it did on a screen.
Choosing Partition as the setting is what made that possible. It supplies a separation no technology can undo and a small piece of it, finding one address, that technology can.
The Decision That Cost The Most
Amit Sharma refused to shoot an Indian location and pass it off as Pakistan, so part of the film was made in Lahore.
Almost no viewer could tell the difference, which is the point. A film about a border being crossed would have been quietly dishonest if the crossing had been faked, and the crew’s knowing it was real changes what ends up on screen.
What It Proved About Distribution
Reunion was made for the internet at a time when Indian advertising still treated online as an offcut of the television buy. It ran long, carried subtitles across two countries and needed no media weight to travel.
That combination is now standard practice. In 2013 it was an argument, and this film is the one usually cited as having won it.
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