This spot features an 11-year-old boy running through a remote war-torn African village. Around him we see militiamen, child soldiers, and terrified civilians running for their lives. The boy’s poetic voiceover narrates the grave realities of becoming a child soldier: “They will take you from your family in the middle of the night, get you high on drugs so you’re brave enough to fight….” The camera slowly pans wide to reveal a soccer ball at his feet, which he dribbles until he hits a series of landmines. He falls to the ground as smoke fills the frame dramatically. As the smoke clears we see him stand up, now on a soccer pitch playing with his friends. He scores a goal as his voiceover concludes: “But I rise above the violence, my childhood is still mine, so I raise my hands up to the sky….”

Children are the most vulnerable group of people in the world. For many, their futures are limited by violence, illiteracy, and inequality. While the stats may seem difficult to believe, the reality is that 150 million boys and girls are engaged in child labour worldwide, 37,000 girls become child brides every day, and there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers across the globe. But Right To Play empowers millions of children to rise above this oppression and these dire statistics. To show the world how powerful their work is, we created an Uprising that had never been seen before: The Child Uprising.

To show the world how Right To Play empowers children to rise above the most dire conditions imaginable, this video tells the story of a boy who doesn’t become a child soldier. We shot the video so that the whole storyline plays out in one scenario. It only has one edit near the end, where we transition from the village of landmines to the soccer pitch. Pacing plays a huge role in telling the boy’s story: we start off in slow motion and tight on his face, making viewers believe that he is a child soldier. As the poem continues, we reveal the soccer ball at his feet, and the pace gets increasingly faster, revealing the chaos that he is rising above. The spot slows to a halt at the explosion scene, creating some drama and suspense before we reveal that he is on a soccer pitch.