The brief

Siemens Healthineers was making a global series of short documentaries about access to healthcare, one story per country. For Vietnam, they asked us to film on Lý Sơn, an island off the coast of central Vietnam.

For years, anyone on Lý Sơn who needed a scan or serious treatment had to take a long, expensive boat trip to the mainland, and the sea doesn't always let boats run. Then a new hospital opened on the island with CT and X-ray machines. The film had to show what that changes for the people who live there.

What made it hard

We had close to three days on the island and a lot to film: the hospital, the doctors, a patient and her story, interviews, and the island itself.

Island weather changes fast, and a cancelled boat or a day of rain could cost us the shoot. So we planned to film everything in two days and kept the third morning free as a backup. That meant a tight plan, with a three-camera crew moving between the hospital and the rest of the island.

The decision that made it work

We treated it as two films in one. Inside the hospital, it was a planned shoot: interviews, and exact shots of the equipment and the care, agreed in advance. Outside, we filmed it like a travel documentary, following the light and the island's daily life: the fishing boats, the garlic fields, the coastal road.

The island footage gives the hospital its meaning. Once you see how far Lý Sơn is from everything, a CT scanner down the road stops being a piece of equipment and becomes time and money saved, and sometimes a life.

On the shoot

Everything was filmed by the end of the second day, as planned. We kept the spare half day.

The result

The film has over 200,000 views on Siemens Healthineers' YouTube channel. The next most-watched film in the series has about 5,000. Vietnam's story became the most-watched in the series by a long way, and Siemens Healthineers has kept working with us since.

Who this kind of film is for

Any organisation that brings care, equipment or services to a place that didn't have them: medical equipment makers, hospitals, and NGOs and donors funding rural health. The change only lands if the audience first feels the distance, so the place matters as much as the product.