MultiVu Creative Wins Platinum Hermes Award for “Kimberly-Clark: A Water Story”

Video Documents South Africa’s Water Crisis

In February 2019, part of the MultiVu Creative team found themselves standing in the middle of the Theewaterskloof Dam in Cape Town, South Africa. With them were 12 crew members, 2 Arri Amira cameras, and a production van strategically parked to block the smoke-laden winds coming off the mountains. The landscape was both breathtaking and somewhat terrifying: mountains climbing towards the horizon, the water from the dam gently lapping the sand, the radiant sun … but those mountains were engulfed in flames, and the dam where they stood – the main source of water for the city – was only at about 30 percent capacity.

This quickly brought them back to the reason they were all there. In 2018, after a terrible drought, Cape Town almost reached Day Zero, a day when all the city’s water taps would be shut off. Even now, the residents had to let the mountain fires persist, as the lack of rain left them without enough water to fight or contain it.

MultiVu Creative was here to capture a story on behalf of its client, Kimberly-Clark, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of essential consumer products. Clean water is a key input to Kimberly-Clark's tissue-making operations, and several of its mills are located in watersheds at high risk for water scarcity, including its facility in Cape Town. The company recognizes that these water-stressed communities have important social needs as well, and the video was an opportunity to help various external stakeholders to see the factors driving water risk and explore sustainable stewardship strategies.

The three-day production included filming the content of a water workshop, hosted at Kimberly-Clark’s facility in Cape Town, where the company invited residents, NGOs, academics, and government officials to discuss meaningful ways to solve the water crisis and aid the people of Cape Town. To help illustrate the issue, the team was able to film the mill’s manufacturing process and follow several members of the workshop to the government’s new water hub and dam.