The film shows a montage of diverse Australians aged 18-35, each confidently showing off their unique strengths and skills, proudly declaring “There’s no one like me.”

This celebratory feel abruptly changes when we cut to a critically ill blood cancer patient lying in a hospital bed, delivering a confronting variation of this same statement: “There’s no one like me … That’s why I need you.”

The film concludes with a powerful statistic (“1,000 Australians urgently need a stem cell donation from someone like you.”) and a call-to-action for Australians to join Strength to Give, Australia’s stem cell donor registry.

Blood cancer is racist. A critically ill patient’s chance of survival depends on the number of registered stem cell donors who share their ethnicity.

As the most ethnically diverse country in the world, and a nation where one person is diagnosed with blood cancer every 28 minutes, Australia faces a critical shortage of donors for many of its minority groups.

To keep up with the urgent need for donors, we were tasked with registering 100,000 Australian stem cell donors aged 18-35 by 2026, with a focus on Australians with First Nations, Pasifika, South East Asian, and Middle Eastern ethnic backgrounds.

We were also tasked with engaging the Australian LGBTQIA+ community, which has historically been excluded from national blood/tissue donor recruitment campaigns.

Australia is a vibrant, multicultural country home to the world’s oldest continuous cultures, as well as Australians who identify with more than 270 ancestries. This rich cultural and ethnic diversity is one of our greatest strengths and central to our national identity, with the vast majority of Australians (84%) believing that multiculturalism has been good for Australia.

Sadly, this incredible diversity also makes it very challenging to find stem cell donors for our nation’s critically ill blood cancer patients.

Approximately 85% of Australians living with blood cancer are forced to rely on a donation from overseas. Unfortunately, overseas donation simply isn’t possible for Australia’s First Nations (Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander) patients, as there’s ‘no one like them’ anywhere else in the world. Not dissimilarly, many South East Asian and Pasifika nations have yet to establish their own stem cell donor registries, making overseas donation impossible for these diasporas.

Our casting brief was simple: “There’s no one like me.”

We searched the nation, street casting real Australians who all had one thing in common: there’s no one like them on Australia’s stem cell donor registry.

We looked for people with urgently-needed ethnic backgrounds, diverse cultural representation, and unique strengths –– from ballroom dance to drifting to rugby league. We also ensured we included people from the LGBTQIA+ community (which has historically been excluded from Australian blood/tissue donor recruitment campaigns).

Our cast is perhaps the most diverse group of people ever assembled in a commercial, Australian or otherwise, with incredible talent from the front to the background.