Responses by Joseph Bonnici, chief creative officer, Bensimon Byrne.
Background: The purpose of the film “Big Fucking Deal” for Casey House, a Toronto-based hospital that specializes in HIV care, is to reframe how people understand HIV today. While medical treatment has advanced to the point where many can live long, healthy lives, the campaign highlights that treatment is only sustainable when stability, stigma-free healthcare, housing and mental health support are also in place. Rather than retelling a simplified medical narrative, the project explores how compounding social pressures shape real outcomes and why institutions like Casey House remain essential. The primary audience is the broader public—particularly those who believe HIV is “solved”—as well as anyone who may not fully understand the systemic barriers people living with HIV still face. By using a human, story-driven approach instead of statistics alone, the campaign aims to shift perception, deepen empathy and encourage a more nuanced understanding of what living with HIV actually requires.
Design thinking: We wanted to challenge the oversimplified narrative that HIV is “just one pill a day.” While medically true for many, that phrase erases the broader conditions required to make treatment sustainable. In conversations with people living with HIV, we repeatedly heard that the real issue wasn’t access to medication—it was stability. Housing, mental health, stigma and systemic pressures all intersect, and when one falters, everything can unravel.
Instead of creating another awareness message focused on treatment, we chose to tell a human story that reflected how these pressures quietly accumulate over time. By grounding the film in lived experiences and universal moments, the goal was to reframe HIV not as a standalone medical issue but as a deeply interconnected human one.
Challenges: Navigating complexity without oversimplifying it. HIV today is often communicated in very clear, clinical terms, but the lived experience is rarely linear or tidy. We wanted to show how housing insecurity, stigma, mental health and substance use can compound over time and how these issues, which we often silo, tend to overlap.
From a craft perspective, depicting this nuance meant practicing restraint. On set, we constantly asked ourselves how much to show versus imply, how long to hold on a look and how to allow moments to feel authentic rather than performative. The challenge was to honor the truth of people’s experiences while resisting the temptation to make the narrative easier or more dramatic than real life actually is.
Favorite details: When we finished the film, we held a premiere at a Toronto cinema. We had more than 200 people filling the seats, some of whom were living with HIV. Afterwards, many of them said they saw their own experience in the film; they had never seen their story told in its full truth until now. The fact we captured the reality of their complex set of experiences—that was the most gratifying part of the process.
New lessons: Director Hubert Davis and editor Ashton Lewis took the club scenes and used them as interludes throughout the film. Originally, the club and Jordan’s dancing were really just one major scene. But when they looked at the footage and saw the way it could be used to bridge parts of the story, it became a much bigger piece that represented different facets of our hero’s journey. I think I learned that at a certain point, you have to throw away the script and tell the right story.
Time constraints: We started this project one year before it premiered. We methodically went through the process from research to strategy, brief and ideation. Then, we took months to craft the film. When we have a project like this, my main priority is to create and then protect the time needed to do something special.
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