Green bananas ripen over time, turning them
into a symbol of hope in Japanese culture --and this year into a :90 holiday video card titled “A Gift of Green Bananas” from
healthcare marketing agency Real Chemistry.
Created by Real Chemistry’s 21Grams group in partnership with Every Cure, a nonprofit that uses AI to find new disease treatments from
existing drugs, the film follows a Japanese-American father and daughter whose ritual of gifting such bananas becomes a symbol of resilience in dealing with a family cancer diagnosis.
The
story that Holland proposed for the holiday card not only “struck an emotional chord,” wrote Frank Mazzola, 21Grams founder and Real Chemistry’s Global Chief Creative Officer in a
blog post, “but in the current cultural climate, it was also a touching and important reminder of the melting pot that America is and was always intended to be. With dialogue that’s a
mixture of English and Japanese (subtitled in English), we see this multigenerational story unfold through the doorway of an immigrant….We all want to connect, be cared for, be healthy, and
have time.”
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The green bananas idea in general stemmed from a story 21Grams “stumbled on” about an oncologist’s patient asking if she still had “‘green
banana time’ while undergoing treatments,” Mazzola recalled.
“At the end of the day, what we created wasn’t a card. Or just a film. Or simply a website you can
participate in. It was a story and tradition that has moved everyone who’s seen it. In other words, we created a gift, “Mazzola concluded. “Please share “The Gift of Green
Bananas”with anyone and everyone you love. And if you’re in a grocery store and happen to see a green banana, give it to someone who needs it. Because to be aware of, and appreciate, the
time we have is a gift in itself.”
Or, as the film notes, “May you always have something to look forward to.”
“A Gift of Green Bananas” was written and
directed by Japanese-American Sarah Kambe Holland, who also directed Biogen’s “Friedrich’s Back,” which won
21Grams’ first-ever Cannes Gold Lion (for branded pharma campaign) earlier this year. That comedic work reimagined 19th-century scientist Nikolaus Friedreich as rising from the grave to make
sense of a world where a treatment now exists (Biogen’s Skyclarys) for the rare neurological disease he discovered: Friedreich ataxia (FA).