Neo Sports Cannes Lion winning film is a rip-off and a scam ad to boot.

Did I get your attention? Good. Lets get ready to gossip!

The silver Lion winning has turned out to be yet another scam ad in the prestigious Cannes award. The same award show that way back in 2001 was saying that scam ads shall not win and that they'd take extra precautions to prevent that (we all know this didn't happen). The suspect is again Ogilvy, Mumbai - and at the risk of never getting another ad from them nor all of India submitted to the commercial archive again - they were doing this as far back as 2001 when four Cannes winners were reported as scam ads. (Yes this here adblog is tres old people.)

The awesome "Tension" film with it's extra tense banging storytelling is a fake ad - says not one, but three little Indian birdies to me. "Fake" by way of never actually airing, that is. I hear gossip like this all the time, but without meat to link to it sadly gets rather weak, since it's all hearsay.

However, there's another angle to this besides the usual calls of "scam ad!" - I've seen this film before!

Back in 2000 (and 1999), I had the pleasure of attending nearly every damn film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. There were world-famous and unknown directors answering audience questions after their screenings, but I could care less as long as I could score as many movies as I could be awake long enough to watch (I didn't sleep for two days!)

One particular film stuck with me though - a short directed by a Japanese man whose name I promptly forgot - where the entire story is played out in a cramped apartment in an anonymous looking apartment block. Someone leaves the gas on when making dinner, kids are playing with sparking toys, dad is lighting a match, sister is blow drying her hair - all sorts of activities by the family could all set that gas off to explode at any time and the film seems to go on forever as we in the audience get way tense by each passing second, and finally the whole apartment explodes and everyone in the cinema mentally wet themselves. It was fantastic - and the director stepped up to answer questions but the audience was far to gobsmacked to ask any. Me and the other ad-nerds that I attended with made bets that night that story and way of telling it would be used in a commercial in the near future, we've waited a long time, but that commercial is finally here

Damn, I wish I could find that short film online right now - as you can see, it's exactly that story that "Neo Sports - Tension" tells in the same manner. The similarity is rather un-funny. Does anyone else out there recall this film? I normally don't post half-baked Badlanders but I fear that my crummy memorybanks and google-fu has failed me in finding this short film, so I turn to you dear readers in the hopes of finding it or at the very least more about it. Help?