Studio Mucho's powerful campaign for Sundance-winning documentary Homeroom

The film features a group of students as they face the anxieties of senior year – test scores and college applications – on top of the rapidly developing Covid-19 pandemic. It also follows the students as they face the challenge of eliminating the presence of law enforcement from an overly policed school district in the wake of a nation demanding systemic change in racial justice.

For Homeroom's campaign materials, the team partnered with Mucho, a global brand strategy and design firm with offices in Barcelona, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco and New York. Mucho's slogan is to 'create with meaning', which they certainly did here in their work for Homeroom.

With clients ranging from Apple to Levi's, Mucho is no stranger to bold posters and powerful campaigns; for this project, they were asked to encapsulate the spirit of the students and the film throughout the campaign materials.

While the typeface used on the film poster is Martin, a typeface by Tré Seals that takes inspiration from the iconic 'I Am A Man' placards during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike protests, the design solution itself transforms the gesture of a student's raised hand into a raised fist.

"We wanted to take a universal symbol of the classroom experience – raising your hand – and turn it into an iconic salute of fighting oppression," said Rob Duncan, creative director at Mucho. "It also represents the determination of today's youth to create change on both a local and systemic level."

The posters feature four of the students in Homeroom: Dwayne Davis, Mica Smith-Dahl, Miguel Cuevas and Itzel Mercado. All four were instructed to take a seat and raise their fist, but they all assume different positions in the final shot. Their different personalities shine through their body language in each of the posters, representing this coming-of-age story.