A Truly Cerebral Campaign

How do you make an awareness film about a condition that never looks the same twice? That's the question at the heart of FightTheStroke's new campaign, and instead of answering it, Italian agency DUDE Milano has made the struggle the crux of the story.

FightTheStroke is an Italian foundation that supports families of young stroke survivors and with a disability of Cerebral Palsy. Cerebral Palsy is one umbrella condition, but it can impact movement, posture, communication, coordination and independence in profoundly different ways from one person to the next. That’s what makes it so hard to explain, let alone represent on screen.

Last year, DUDE and FightTheStroke launched their partnership with a manifesto film introducing the condition. This year's brief was to go deeper and make Cerebral Palsy recognisable by showing its many different manifestations.

“A Truly Cerebral Campaign” is a self-aware, gently comic short film that turns the camera on the agency itself. It follows a creative team handed an impossible brief: explain Cerebral Palsy clearly and definitively, in 30 seconds, within a week. Their neat one-line definition doesn't survive the casting studio, as every person they meet adds something new. With each rewrite the script grows longer and less certain, until the whiteboard is crammed with caveats and the team concludes, deadpan, “We might need a smaller font.”

Mixing workplace comedy with casting scenes featuring real people with Cerebral Palsy, the film lets the audience learn alongside the creatives and reach the same realisation that Cerebral Palsy isn't one thing, and it can't be told as a single story. It closes with a call to action: there are countless ways to represent the condition, because there are countless ways to live with it, so it's time to show the world your talents.

The second phase of the campaign invites people with Cerebral Palsy around the world to send in a simple self-tape, introducing themselves, talking about their condition and, above all, showing what they can do. That could be dancing, sport, singing, playing an instrument, speaking languages, their job, a hobby or simply an everyday task done their own way. Entries are shared using #TrulyCerebral and tagging @FightTheStroke. They will become part of the Truly Cerebral Casting Archive, an evolving digital collection designed to help agencies, production companies, filmmakers and brands discover new faces and make inclusive casting a more natural part of how stories get told.

“A Truly Cerebral Campaign” launches on 2 October across FightTheStroke's website, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn with media by Kotton.