Oscar-winning Director Andrea Arnold’s First Ever Commercial

The UK’s leading youth charity The Prince’s Trust will today launch a campaign championing the resilience and potential of young people, following new research showing young people’s confidence is suffering – with one in five 11 to 19-year-olds believing they will amount to nothing, one in four thinking people do not believe in them, and almost half thinking they will struggle to find employment.

 

Breaking with a TV advert directed by Oscar-winning film director Andrea Arnold and created by advertising agency CHI&Partners, the ‘Youth Can Do It’ campaign shines a light on the hardships some young people face, and how drive and confidence and a helping hand can empower them to rewrite their own futures and reverse these statistics.

 

 

The campaign marks a first-ever brand partnership for Arnold, whose 20-year career spans films including Oscar-winner and Academy Award-winner Wasp (2004), and three Cannes Jury Prize winners, Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016).

 

Arnold, known for her scenes of gritty realism, chose to work with the charity – which helps young people aged 11 to 30 into jobs, education or training – because of her passion for youth empowerment and her belief in the determination that spurs children and adolescents on to succeed. 

 

Written and performed by young people who have themselves overcome adversity, the film aims to have a genuine impact on youth culture because of its authenticity.

 

The script is a poem, ‘Bulletproof’, written and performed in the film by 16-year-old Maya Sourie – a winner of last year’s national youth poetry competition SLAMbassadors – who spent large parts of her own childhood in foster care.

 

Through a montage of scenes, from a child protecting a younger sibling from danger, to a young mum looking after her baby, to a young man packing his bags and moving out of a garage and into his first home, and an anxious young man securing his first job.  Sourie’s poem spreads the message that “pain is nothing but fuel to reach my full potential” – speaking for all young people born into difficult circumstances.

 

"I'm really proud to have been part of this project" said Sourie. "It felt extremely important to spread the message that any circumstance you may have found yourself in should never be allowed to act as a limitation, but as a way to learn and discover the power you hold within – that happiness is a mindset and begins with loving yourself for who you really are."

 

In order to make the film as authentic as possible, Arnold cast young people whose lives and circumstances reflected those in the script, filming the scenes in their own homes and dressing them in items from their own wardrobes. 

 

The soundtrack is a raw, uplifting, contemporary choral piece, performed by inner-city youth choir Inner Voices and composed specifically for the film by Simon Bass.

 

The TV advert will be supported by a print and out-of-home campaign.

 

Paul Brown, Director of Marketing & Communications at The Prince’s Trust, said: “The survey results we reveal today show just how much work still needs to be done to ensure every young person can achieve their full potential. That’s why our new campaign ‘Youth Can Do It’ aims to speak directly to young people with a message of hope and optimism. We hope this campaign will inspire young people to discover the confidence and determination they need to achieve their dreams. And we want to tell the world that everyone in The Prince’s Trust Community is here to help them find that confidence and turn their lives around.”

 

Yan Elliott, Joint Executive Creative Director at CHI&Partners, said: “From the moment Andrea agreed to work with us on this campaign, we knew it would be something special. Rather than preaching, we wanted to show ‘Youth Can Do It’ in action – using Maya’s incredible poem as the script, and working with a real-life cast and with youth choir Inner Voices on the music. We couldn’t be more proud of the result, and hope it touches the lives of young people everywhere.”

 

The Prince’s Trust’s study into the confidence of young people was conducted by Censuswide, across a sample of 2,224 young people aged 11 to 19, who took part in an online survey between the 13th and 29th of July 2017.