Luanda W/ O X
A one-week cultural immersion in Luanda, filmed entirely on GoPro and edited into a raw portrait of the city's streets, sounds, and soul.
"No decks. No deliverables. Just go, look, listen, and bring something back."
"The point wasn't to document Angola for an outsider audience. It was to build an internal creative reference that no stock library or trend report could replace."
"The footage became a sensory briefing: unpolished, unscripted, and impossible to fake."
The Luanda agency asked the strategy and art direction team to fly in and absorb the city's culture in a rapid one-week raid. I filmed everything on GoPro, edited the footage, and produced a short film scored by local artist O X da Questão. The result became both a creative tool for the team back in Lisbon and proof that the agency's positioning (communication with an accent) was more than a slogan.
The agency had a positioning built on a simple conviction: real communication speaks with an accent. It draws from the culture it lives in, not from a boardroom thousands of kilometres away. When the Luanda office asked the strategy and creative direction team in Lisbon to come and absorb the city first-hand, the brief was wide open. No decks. No deliverables. Just go, look, listen, and bring something back.
An agency positioning that needed proving. "Communication with an accent" only works if the people making the work actually understand the accent. The Luanda office needed the Lisbon team to stop referencing Angola from a distance and start feeling it up close.
One week. No script. Full exposure. The challenge wasn't creative direction in any traditional sense. It was about surrender: walking the streets without a shot list, following the rhythm of the city, and trusting that the material would reveal itself.
I strapped a GoPro on and went everywhere. Rap battles at 3am in the middle of Luanda's streets. Narrow alleys and backstreets. Cuca beers at cantinas. Live music houses. Barbecues at Angolan homes. Markets, corners, conversations, silence.
The point wasn't to document Angola for an outsider audience. It was to build an internal creative reference that no stock library or trend report could replace. The footage became a sensory briefing: unpolished, unscripted, and impossible to fake.
I shot everything, edited the full film, and scored it with music from O X da Questão, a local artist we met during the week. The sound wasn't a soundtrack choice. It was part of the immersion.
The film became an internal tool and cultural artefact. It gave the Lisbon team a visceral connection to Luanda that informed the tone, references, and instincts behind subsequent campaigns for the Angolan market.
More than a video, it was proof that "communication with an accent" isn't a tagline. It's a method. You earn the accent by showing up.