The new video of the Nike "Just Do It" campaign with Götze and Sané
"Helden": to inspire a new generation of German athletes
November 5th, 2019
On November 9th, 1989 the Berlin Wall was demolished, re-opening the boundaries and giving life to a new Germany, freer, open-minded and multicultural, a change that over the years has also affected sport. "Helden" ("heroes"), the first film made in Germany for Nike's Just Do It campaign, was inspired by minorities and sport as the unifying element of the young Germans' ambitions and dreams.
Among the protagonists of the commercial are Borussia Dortmund striker and World Champion Mario Götze and Leroy Sané. The star of Manchester City, born in 1996 from a German mother and a Senegalese father, is the symbol of a new multicultural generation of young players, which includes names such as Serge Gnabry, Nadiem Amiri, Jonathan Tah.
The images, which alternate moments of football, basketball, running, skateboarding and boxing with social issues such as poverty and discrimination, are united under the claim "Du tust es nie nur für dich" ("You never do it just for yourself "), which appears along with a symbolic image of an athlete with Hijab that surpasses what remains of the Berlin Wall.
The video is an encouragement to not give up, celebrating the power of sport and determination, which helps to achieve sports goals and can inspire gestures aimed at the whole community. To tell the story of the athletes, which also includes the Paralympic athlete Léon Schäfer and the boxer Zeina Nassar, are the words and the music of "Helden", the German version of the song "Heroes" by David Bowie. The soundtrack was composed by the British artist in Berlin, a city that inspired and helped him to get out of an artistic and personal crisis.