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Welcome to the Sayaboury Primary Health Care Project Video

Introduction
by

Australia Lao PDR Programme, Save the Children, Field Representative,,

In partnership with the Ministry of Public Health, and with funding support from AusAID, Save the Children Australia (SCA) together with the Sayaboury Department of health, began implementing a comprehensive primary health care (PHC) project in 1992 in Sayaboury Province, situated between the Mekong river and the Thai border in the N.W of the Lao PDR. Project activities have gradually extended to cover the entire province of 10 districts and 547 villages with a total population of 307,086, which is comprised of many ethnic minority groups. As the project has become something of a model for the country, we felt it was important to document the project in a video format, both as an introduction to the project for health staff from other provinces, and also to better inform donors and others outside of the country who may have an interest in primary health care.

Subsequently, an independent filmmaker, Tom Riddle, was contracted to produce the video you will see on this CD.

Production began in late May. Carol Perks, the SCA Health Advisor (who has been working on the project for 10 years) directed the scenes with support from Dr. Kamla Phoutonsey, the head of the Sayaboury Primary Health Care Project. The Save the Children Australia accountant, Bounleua Outhipanya, was trained to be the assistant cameraman and a Save the Children project officer, Somchit Philaphon, was nominated to be the interviewer. Shooting took five days with location shots at the Sayaboury Primary Health Care head office, at a nearby school, at a district hospital, at a district dispensary, and in a remote village where a mobile medical team was filmed.

Final production was done in the Vientiane office. There the subtitles were added, the English and Lao voice-overs were done, and other enhancements were made.

The final product is part entertainment and part information. It is a very Lao-oriented production. It begins with an interview with the program director. From there one gets a tour of a village dispensary. The movie finishes with scenes of a mobile clinic and interviews with people connected to it. None of the answers to the questions were scripted.

We have distributed this video as a VCD (the Asian version of DVD) and on videocassette to others involved in health care programmes in Laos and to AusAID and a few of our other donors. We hope that this video will make a contribution to improving the quality of primary health care throughout the country.

— John Howe, 2003

Production Notes
by Tom Riddle, the filmmaker.

From start to finish this was a dream assignment. We began with a 10-hour drive to Sayaboury from Vientiane. This route took us through some of the most beautiful countryside in all of Southeast Asia. (I've included a few of the pictures that I took along the way.)

The town of Sayaboury is still small enough to walk around most of it. I liked the small restaurants and the relaxed atmosphere of the town. Plus, the river that flows through town is beautiful.

Carol Perks, the project's technical advisor, Somchit Philaphon, who did the interviews, and Dr. Kamla, the head of the project, all have infinite patience. On my suggestion Somchit and DR Kamla, with Carol's support, repeated, in full, the interview with Dr. Kamla until everyone, including me, felt that we had it right. That took four-takes. What you see in the video, by the way, is the full uncut and unedited interview. Likewise the baby-weighing scene was re-shot on a second day because I didn't think that the first take was quite right.

In an early draft of the movie, the subtitles of the interviews were simply summaries of what the people were talking about. Later, however, John Howe made a more literal line-by-line translation that, in retrospect, makes for much more rewarding viewing.

In the Vientiane office Somchit and Bounleua, the assistant cameraman, were of invaluable help. They watched the movie many times outside of working hours, and made many helpful suggestions. The English narrator, Feiny Sentosa, never complained when we asked her to redo parts of the voice-over again and again.

To do the filming I used one microphone, the Sennheiser ME 66 and two movie cameras-- the Sony DSR-PD150P and the SONY VX2000. (To read more about the technical aspects of movie making, you are welcome to read the off-line FAQ from my home page, http://www.thomasriddle.org.)

Editing was done with Adobe Premiere 6.02 on an IBM notebook computer with 30 gigabytes of disk space. I used the Ligos Plug-in to export the file from Premiere as a VCD compatible MPG. I should note that even though it is a little unusual in this part of the world, all of my software is legal.