Afternoons with Max Marshall: Short Film

In 2012, AIVL produced this film about a radio producer who spent years biting his tongue about the station shock-jock’s narrow-minded views towards people who inject drugs. But when a heated debate at the station’s Christmas party gets out of hand, he reveals a secret that changes everything.

AIVL realised a complete understanding of how the general community’s view of drug use and drug users had come to exist was necessary. We knew that in order to engage an advertising company and expect them to understand all the nuances of the subject from our perspective, we had to provide them with a document that gave them adequate context.

The result was a document that gives an historical, political and social analysis from the perspective of people who inject drugs as to how the ‘War on Drugs’ evolved, and how it impacts on the lives of people who inject drugs today: Why Wouldn’t I Discriminate Against All Of Them – A Report on Stigma and Discrimination towards the Injecting Drug User Community.

Armed with a deeper understanding of the history of the demonisation of people who inject, AIVL set out to find an advertising company, the right company to help us design and execute a public education campaign. We thought this would be a challenge, until we saw the work of an agency from Adelaide called FNUKY.

FNUKY’s work and approach resonated, so we sent them our brief. FNUKY understood what we wanted to achieve and believed in it. Their commitment, passion and energy made our task so much easier. At that time we had little idea of what format the campaign would take; until FNUKY suggested a short film. We knew from the market research we would have to tackle the subject in a very gentle, non-threatening manner.

While Afternoons with Max Marshall is suitable for the general public, we targeted the film at a specific section of the community: young people in post-secondary and tertiary education.

This is not a hard-hitting, ‘in-your-face’ style film; it was designed to be a gentle, thought-provoking film that would promote discussion and conversations about injecting drug use and, more importantly, the stigma aimed at people who inject drugs.

We hope you enjoy our little film that has a very big job to do!