paula the homeless polar bear
 
the fragile arctic is under threat from both climate change and oil drilling
as climate change melts the arctic ice, oil companies are moving in to extract
more of the fossil fuels that caused the melt in the first place.
it's a catastrophe waiting to happen.
greenpeace is working to halt climate change and to stop this new oil rush at the top of the world. so how can we galvanise support and inspire people to help?
partizan director michael geoghegan had an idea; what if the arctic ice melted
completely and polar bears became our new urban foxes.
so “paula the homeless polar bear” was created and has proved to be the
key communications vehicle for greenpeace’s global save the arctic campaign.
actor jude law and british band radiohead joined forces on the film along with
puppeteers from london’s broadway and west end production ‘war horse’.
the film has been translated into mandarin, arabic, hebrew, spanish, russian,
german, talian, french and portuguese… and has helped drive 3 million supporters
to sign up to the global campaign to protect the area around the north pole.
the film was hosted by the guardian and the telegraph, as msn, grist and
huffington post etc, blogged about it, shots, the daily mirror, music week,
adweek, nme, rolling stone, black book, nz herald, earth observer, think
progress, great ads, punk news, the beak street bugle, contact music, prefixmag, alaskadispatch, rekwired, scoop world, paste, the low down under, think progress,
greenplastic, under the radar, web pro news… covered its launch and it had a uk
wide (530 Screen) cinema release schedule c/o pearl and dean.
paula has also played out on terrestrial tv channels and several satellite channels in new zealand, it screened in over 15 cinemas in germany; screened by the biggest cinema
chain in luxembourg; screened in france over the summer and will appear before every screening of the dark knight rises in india.
the films launch was followed up with homeless polar bears being spotted in 20
cities spanning the globe (and on our ship the esperanza in alaska!). 
the campaign was then formally launched as http://www.savethearctic.org/went
live at the rio+20 earth summit with entrepreneur sir richard branson, actress
lucy lawless, greenpeace international executive director kumi naidoo and clayton
thomas-muller of the indigenous environmental network, and was supported by
over 150 celebrities, including paul mccartney, richard branson, penelope cruz and one direction (who’s supporters’ energetic tweeting temporarily crashed our website…).
10,000 people signed up in the first hour. 
to cap all of this, with well over a million views online and counting, the film
continues to be one of greenpeace’s most successful films to date.