The brief

In 2025 Oxfam marked 70 years in Vietnam. Its first work here was humanitarian aid in 1955, and it has run development programmes since the late 1980s. For the anniversary, Oxfam wanted a short film that introduces who it is and what it does, made mostly from the footage it already had. We won the job with a creative pitch.

What made it hard

Oxfam works on a lot: gender equality, good governance, sustainable livelihoods, climate change adaptation, and the farmers, fishers and ethnic minority communities at the centre of all of it. Seventy years had to fit into about a minute and a half, built from footage shot by many different people over many years, and it still had to feel like one film.

The decision that made it work

Our pitch was called "All within our grasp". It used hands as the thread: a woman passing on cloth she has woven, a microphone handed to someone at a community meeting, fresh spices passed from one hand to the next, and finally many hands held together.

The finished film changed a lot from the pitch, as archive-led films do once you see what footage actually exists. The structure moved to Oxfam's focus areas, each one opening with a single word on screen (equality, gender equality, good governance, sustainable livelihoods and climate adaptation) with the work shown underneath. The idea of people holding on to each other stayed in, down to children running hand in hand at sunset.

It ends on people. A fisherwoman with her net, a mushroom farmer, a tea picker, a forest ranger, ethnic minority women in the forest they look after, each looking straight into the camera. Then the portraits multiply into a wall of faces. After a minute of programmes, the last thing you see is who they were for.

The result

Oxfam used the film on its social channels for the anniversary year.

Also for Oxfam: WEAVE

WEAVE was a project on women's economic empowerment in agricultural value chains, funded by Australian Aid and run by CARE, Oxfam and SNV. In 2020 we made a 4-minute animated explainer in Vietnamese with English subtitles.

The film explains an abstract idea, economic empowerment, through simple scenes from a rural household. In one, a husband and wife fill in a checklist of who does what at home and who decides how money is spent, and see for the first time how unevenly the work falls. The film then follows ethnic minority women learning new skills in production, marketing and running producer groups.

Who this kind of film is for

NGOs and development agencies marking an anniversary, launching a strategy or introducing themselves to new partners, with years of footage and a lot of work to show.