Carmen Vidal Balanzat

Most young directors would go to the other side of the world to secure their first job, but Carmen Vidal Balanzat preferred to stay at home. When EuroRSCG 360 approached her with a PSA for France’s National Committee for Tobacco Control, she not only convinced them to take her on but also to cross the Atlantic to make the fi lm.

“We spoke about my ideas and they decided to bet on my proposal – even though it meant coming to New York to shoot it,” says the Ibiza-born director, who studied film in Barcelona, Prague and New York before settling in Brooklyn.

Vidal Balanzat has spent the past few years working as a director of photography, a producer on acclaimed cultural magazine show Nueva York – a Spanish-language programme about Latinos living in the city – and making a couple of short films, one of which, 6am, got her noticed by EuroRSCG.

“I’ve always felt comfortable with short formats,” she says. “I try to make every image count, and it was fun to synthesise the story this way.” But she admits that commercials are virgin territory for her.

Breaking the Cycle begins with a woman taking her final breaths in a battle with lung cancer and then follows a man, who we assume is her husband, storming through the hospital until he finds the maternity ward and cracks an evil smile. It transpires he is a tobacco company executive concerned about replenishing potential customers who he can sell his product to.

Shot at a real hospital on Roosevelt Island, the spot incorporates nods to several of Vidal Balanzat’s biggest influences. “I used different references, including the universe of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s music and the characters in Mad Men and the films The Insider and Wall Street [the first one].”

It’s a clever and chilling film that will hopefully make people ponder their own smoking habits – a difficult thing to achieve, as the director understands. “These campaigns are challenging because they are trying to change habits that are deeply rooted in our society, and that’s not easy,” she says. “The change has to come from many different places, and the campaign is a support to this change, to raise awareness about an issue and educate the audience.”

It’s a challenge that Vidal Balanzat rose to and, while the ad’s long-term success is difficult – if not impossible – to measure, the power with which it conveys its message is as clear as day. Signed to new company Gotham Productions, Vidal Balanzat is now developing a documentary and writing a script for a narrative film. She describes both projects as being in “embryonic” stages.