A friend posted this video on Facebook:
The video tells a story, but its purpose goes beyond storytelling: it is a marketing tactic used by a company that sells copywriting services. The blind man represents potential clients, the pedestrians are potential customers of those clients, and the mysterious woman represents Purplefeather.
According to the description on YouTube it is an “[h]omage to Historia de un letrero, The Story of a Sign by Alonso Alvarez Barreda”, where “homage” really means “remake”. You could argue that it was sleazy of Purplefeather to rip off the earlier film. You could also argue that there’s nothing wrong with a remake, especially when the source is itself a retelling of a previously told story. Regardless, I’m not sure why Purplefeather wouldn’t demonstrate its copywriting skills by writing something original.
Something else feels off to me: I’ve seen comments in various places describing the story as “beautiful” and “powerful”, but to me, the core message of the story is not particularly heartwarming or inspiring. The good samaritan is kind of a jerk, altering the sign without permission and without telling the blind man what it says. And the good samaritan as a proxy for the storyteller (i.e., the filmmaker) seems a bit self-congratulatory, as if saying to the audience, “Aren’t you glad I taught you this lesson about marketing?”
To me it is an interesting parable about human nature, but the same point could have been made with the “blind” man actually being a con artist whose “sales” have been slumping until he himself comes up with the clever marketing tactic. Different story with the same lesson: how you convey your message affects the material rewards it will get you. And perhaps a secondary lesson: people want to be compassionate, but sometimes you have to sell them a little on the idea.
On the other hand, “Historia de un letrero” was a winner at Cannes in 2008, I suspect because it was seen as heartwarming. Maybe the filmmakers would not have won if they had told my con-artist version of the story. So maybe the story is itself a demonstration that how you convey your message matters — even when the message is that “How you convey your message matters.”