Bureau Veritas at Ialy: Three Films on Building Hydropower Safely
AFD (the French Development Agency) is marking 30 years in Vietnam with a photo exhibition at the Embassy of France in Hanoi and the Consulate General of France in Ho Chi Minh City. Thirty projects are on the walls. One of them is the Ialy Hydropower Plant Extension, a project we spent three years documenting for Bureau Veritas.
The exhibition is about AFD’s work, not ours. Still, it is good to see a story we helped tell chosen as one worth telling again.
What is the Ialy extension?
Ialy, in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, is one of the country’s largest hydropower plants. The extension adds two 180 MW turbines, bringing total capacity to 1,080 MW, without flooding any additional land.
The point is not simply more electricity. The extension captures water that would otherwise overflow, supplies power at peak hours, and gives the grid more room to take on solar and wind. AFD estimates it will replace around 220 GWh of fossil generation and avoid 68,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year.
AFD financed the extension for EVN with a €74.7 million concessional loan, signed in 2021.
Where Bureau Veritas comes in
Alongside the loan, the European Union funded a €2 million technical assistance program for EVN, managed by AFD under the Team Europe approach. Its aim was to bring EVN’s Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) and Operation & Maintenance practices up to international standards, with Ialy as the pilot.
Bureau Veritas Vietnam delivered that assistance in a consortium with Tractebel, working with EVN to strengthen health, safety and environmental management on site, with lessons from Ialy to be shared across EVN’s other hydropower projects. None of this is visible from a drone. That was the challenge we were given.
The brief: film the cooperation, not the concrete
Bureau Veritas did not need a construction log. They needed documentaries AFD could use to show how a European funder, a Vietnamese utility and an international technical team worked together, and what changed on site because of it.
We made three films between 2022 and 2025, one each year, each on one aspect of that year’s phase of the technical assistance. We started in 2022, the year 9G Pictures was founded. That makes Ialy one of our first engagements and one of the longest we have carried with a single client.
The three films had to stand alone and also work as a set. We kept the same visual language, the same interview approach and the same pace, so a viewer watching all three sees one project unfolding, not three separate productions.
The voices of the partnership
At the core of each film are interviews with leadership from AFD and EVN, alongside the Bureau Veritas team. These are people who usually speak about a project in reports and meetings. Our job was to let them speak plainly on camera about what was difficult, how it was resolved, and what the cooperation made possible.
We kept the setups simple: a quiet room, soft light, and questions prepared with the client but open enough for real answers. Leadership interviews work best when the production disappears.
Cinematic Vision. Authentic Storytelling.
A documentary about a real program has to stay close to the facts. Nothing is staged and nothing is exaggerated. But facts alone do not show scale, and they do not show effort.
That is where visual storytelling earns its place. A wide frame that holds the dam against the valley. A slow push-in on a worker’s gloved hands. The last light at the end of a shift. These choices let a viewer feel the size of the project and the care of the people who built it, which is what the films were for.
When someone asks what Cinematic Vision. Authentic Storytelling. means in practice, Ialy is the project we point to.
If you are documenting an infrastructure or development program in Vietnam, whether for a funder, a contractor or a technical partner, we would be glad to hear about it.
[Contact us →]
- Client: Bureau Veritas Vietnam
- Project: Ialy Hydropower Plant Extension (2 × 180 MW)
- Financing: AFD concessional loan; EU-funded technical assistance managed by AFD
- Owner: EVN · Period: 2022–2025 · Deliverables: three documentary films
- Our role: pre-production, on-site filming, leadership interviews, post-production
