Three episodes. One slum community. A research-grade evaluation behind it.
This is the project we point to when someone asks what makes Anirar 360 different from a video production house. It's also the answer to why our pricing is what it is.
We didn't just produce a drama. We helped design the methodology, worked with the research team on logframe alignment, ran participatory casting from within the community, supported community screenings as a behaviour-change touchpoint, and contributed to the baseline-midline-endline evaluation framework.
Because a drama divorced from a Theory of Change is just entertainment.
What the work actually looked like
Methodology co-design. We sat with the BRAC JPGSPH research team and anchored the drama inside the project's logical framework. Where did this intervention fit in the Theory of Change? What outcomes was it expected to influence? What would we measure?
Participatory casting. The cast came from within the community, not parachuted in. We ran identification workshops with community gatekeepers, held readings, rehearsed in context. The performers carried the lived experience because they were living it.
Community screenings. The drama wasn't a one-way broadcast. We supported facilitated screenings inside Kalyanpur Pora Bosti, where the drama was filmed, turning the screening itself into a behaviour-change moment rather than just a measurement event.
Evaluation contribution. We helped the team think through what shifts the drama should reasonably move (knowledge, attitude, practice) and how baseline, midline, and endline instruments could pick those shifts up in a way that would survive a peer reviewer.
Why this matters
Most film briefs that come to us are straightforward, and we treat them that way. But the briefs that genuinely matter, the ones tied to advocacy moments, donor visits, programme inflection points, behaviour-change campaigns, benefit from a partner who reads logframes, understands theories of change, and can sit in the room with an M&E team without translation.
That isn't a cost line. It's a quiet capability that comes with us.
When a programme team arrives with "we need a film for our policy launch," we tend to ask the questions that should be asked. What is this film trying to shift? Who needs to see it for that shift to happen? What does success look like in measurement terms? How does this fit the wider campaign architecture?
Not because we want to be difficult. Because asking those questions is how the work lands.
If they're already being asked, we get out of the way and produce the film. If they aren't, we ask them, gently, because we have been on the other side of that conversation too many times.