Girl Up's 'Time to Rise' film by Berlin Cameron united Corinne Foxx, Nigel Barker, and supporters reciting Invictus to champion gender equality in the United
ARCHIVEGirl Up Time to Rise Reframes a Classic Poem for Gender Equality
Girl Up's "Time to Rise" is a 2018 public-interest film created by Berlin Cameron in which Corinne Foxx, Nigel Barker, Jasmine Barker, and Girl Up supporters recite William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" to advance the organisation's gender equality mission across the United States.
Published in May 2018, the campaign arrived at a culturally charged moment in the United States, when conversations about gender equity had moved from the margins to the mainstream of public life. Girl Up, founded by the United Nations Foundation in 2010 according to girlup.org, had built its reputation on girls' leadership and education advocacy. By 2018, the organisation judged that its visual identity and messaging needed to match the urgency of the moment, and it engaged Berlin Cameron — a New York agency — to execute a full strategic rebrand. "Time to Rise" was the flagship film produced from that process, sitting within the Public Interest industry category and carrying a single primary media asset.
The campaign's central mechanic was the collective recitation of "Invictus," the 1875 poem by William Ernest Henley that has long been associated with individual, and implicitly masculine, defiance. Berlin Cameron described the work, per berlincameron.com, as a deliberate post-election effort to elevate Girl Up's message and challenge traditional depictions of masculinity by redistributing the poem's defiant language across a chorus of voices that included celebrities, advocates, and ordinary Girl Up supporters. The decision to feature Corinne Foxx — daughter of Jamie Foxx and herself a prominent advocate — alongside photographer and television personality Nigel Barker and his daughter Jasmine gave the film both cultural visibility and intergenerational resonance. In reframing "Invictus" as a collective, gender-inclusive statement, the campaign transformed a familiar cultural property into a fresh public-service argument, all within the United States media landscape of May 2018.
Berlin Cameron grounded the campaign's strategic rationale in the cultural climate of the United States following the 2016 presidential election. The agency identified a specific tension worth exploiting: "Invictus," one of the English language's most recognised poems about unconquerable will, had been claimed almost exclusively by male figures in popular culture, from Nelson Mandela to Hollywood films. According to berlincameron.com, the agency positioned the "Time to Rise" film as a deliberate reappropriation — taking that masculine iconography and distributing it among women, girls, and allied voices to argue that resilience and agency belong equally to all.
The strategic frame also served Girl Up's institutional needs. The organisation was undergoing a comprehensive rebrand, with Berlin Cameron producing new brand guidelines, a revised logo, a style guide, an updated mission statement, and supporting collateral, per berlincameron.com. The film was the emotional and public centrepiece of that broader identity project, designed to signal to donors, partners, and young supporters that Girl Up was entering a more assertive phase of its advocacy work in the United States.
Within the competitive landscape of public-interest communications, Girl Up operated alongside organisations including UN Women and the Girl Scouts of the USA, both of which command significant public awareness and media presence. To differentiate, Berlin Cameron leaned into intertextual strategy — referencing a canonical literary text — rather than conventional cause-advertising tropes such as statistics-led urgency or celebrity endorsement alone. The casting of Corinne Foxx and Nigel Barker added earned-media potential without reducing the film to a standard celebrity public-service announcement, a distinction that matters in a public-interest category crowded with well-intentioned but formulaic work.
Lenny Bass directed "Time to Rise" for Girl Up, working under the production banner of Bella Donna, with executive producers Rene Bastian and Mikha Grumet overseeing the production, as documented on clapboard.com. The film's creative direction was led by Gio Maletti and Michael Milligan, with Emily Bond serving as account supervisor and Eric Weiss as executive producer on the agency side at Berlin Cameron — a leadership structure that combined experienced brand strategists with production specialists familiar with purpose-driven content.
The creative execution centred on the act of recitation as visual and emotional architecture. Rather than constructing a conventional narrative around a single protagonist, the film distributed the stanzas of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" across multiple speakers — Corinne Foxx, Nigel Barker, Jasmine Barker, and a wider community of Girl Up supporters — creating a cumulative effect in which the poem's declarations of will and self-determination accumulate across different faces, ages, and backgrounds. This approach transformed a solo Victorian utterance into a polyphonic public-interest argument, which was formally consistent with Girl Up's organisational premise that collective action underpins individual empowerment.
The choice of "Invictus" as source material was itself a significant creative decision. The poem, written by William Ernest Henley in 1875, carries embedded associations with perseverance under adversity, and its recontextualisation within a gender-equality frame required the production to resist sentimentality while preserving the poem's rhetorical force. Jennifer DaSilva, president of Berlin Cameron, oversaw the campaign at the agency level, according to clapboard.com, providing strategic alignment between the film's tone and the broader rebrand objectives for Girl Up in the United States.
ARCHIVENo verified third-party performance data for the "Time to Rise" film — such as broadcast reach figures, social engagement metrics, or independent audience measurement — is publicly available. The campaign's television spot publication date is documented as September 20, 2018, per ispot.tv, indicating that the film entered broadcast distribution several months after its initial May 2018 release, suggesting a phased rollout strategy designed to extend the campaign's presence across the second half of the year in the United States.
One concrete outcome is documented in relation to the broader Berlin Cameron engagement with Girl Up. According to berlincameron.com, a fundraising pitch deck produced as part of the same rebrand effort generated a twenty-five percent increase in funds for the organisation. While this figure is attributed to the pitch deck rather than exclusively to the "Time to Rise" film, it establishes that the Berlin Cameron work as a whole produced a measurable institutional result for Girl Up, reinforcing the strategic value of combining a public-facing film with supporting donor-facing materials.
Structurally, "Time to Rise" demonstrates qualities associated with durable public-interest work. The intertextual anchoring in William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" provides the campaign with a self-contained cultural argument that does not depend on news-cycle momentum to remain legible. The ensemble casting of Corinne Foxx and Nigel Barker alongside non-celebrity Girl Up supporters avoids the credibility risks of pure celebrity cause-washing. Clapboard assigns "Time to Rise" a score of 68 out of 100, reflecting a well-executed and strategically coherent piece of public-service communication that falls short of benchmark-setting work primarily in the absence of a documented, measurable audience impact tied directly to the film itself.
"Time to Rise" is a 2018 public-interest film for Girl Up created by Berlin Cameron. The film features Corinne Foxx, Nigel Barker, Jasmine Barker, and Girl Up supporters reciting William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" to advance gender equality advocacy across the United States, functioning as the centrepiece of a broader Girl Up rebrand.
Berlin Cameron chose "Invictus" to challenge its traditionally masculine associations. According to berlincameron.com, the agency reframed William Ernest Henley's poem as a collective, gender-inclusive statement, redistributing its language of resilience and agency across women, girls, and allied voices as part of Girl Up's post-election repositioning in the United States.
Corinne Foxx is a prominent advocate and public figure who appears in "Time to Rise" reciting William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" alongside Nigel Barker and Jasmine Barker. Her casting gave the Girl Up film cultural visibility and earned-media potential, distinguishing it from conventional celebrity public-service announcements in the United States public-interest landscape.
Lenny Bass directed "Time to Rise" for Girl Up, as documented on clapboard.com. The film was produced by Bella Donna, with executive producers Rene Bastian and Mikha Grumet. Creative direction at Berlin Cameron was led by Gio Maletti and Michael Milligan, with Jennifer DaSilva serving as agency president on the campaign.
No verified third-party performance data for the film is publicly available. However, according to berlincameron.com, the broader Berlin Cameron engagement with Girl Up — which included a fundraising pitch deck — generated a twenty-five percent increase in funds for the organisation, indicating meaningful institutional impact from the 2018 rebrand effort.
Girl Up sought a more assertive public identity in the United States following the 2016 election. Per berlincameron.com, Berlin Cameron developed new brand guidelines, a logo, a style guide, and a revised mission statement alongside the "Time to Rise" film, signalling to donors and young supporters that Girl Up was entering a more urgent phase of gender equality advocacy.
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