Guest studio 1: António Aleixa

HEY EVERYONE!

The worst nightmare of a storyteller is being taken to a world where he doesn't know the rules on which people behave, act and think. As an european I never thought this would be much of a deal, coming to The Netherlands. But it turns out that it was quite so... The Dutch and the Portuguese are amazingly close in distance when compared to personality and social behavior.


So, as you can imagine, my first problem was "how can I write about something I don't know?" - And after some research I found exactly what I was looking for, a bridge between the two countries, an island of my own culture in The Netherlands, a place about which I would be confident enough to write about. What I found were numerous stories of modern slavery concerning Portuguese victims in The Netherlands. Although it seems unbelievable, such stories do exist. People get promised three times as much money they can make in Portugal (around 1600€), plus housing and transportation for one year contracts. We are talking about people without education whatsoever, from rural areas where some barely know how to write in Portuguese and don't know a single word of English, not to mention Dutch... Off course they never get what they are told and they are frequently harassed in all different ways.
The stories are very intriguing, some I would say even macabre but I feel like fish in the water because I'm really not the "and they lived happily ever after" ending type. I always prefer to work on the dark side of people... But anyway, in case some of you want to know more about these cases of modern slavery, please drop by. I'll be happy to explain what I found out and give you some more info.

Meanwhile, at Upperunder, we are still working in some other projects as a documentary on the influences of western culture in African children, specially based in the Gambian youth (Everything has been shot by Bas two years ago and I am now editing), two music videos and one fictional commercial for a fictional communications company that we will shoot in Portugal in the first week of September and that will serve as a low budget commercial portfolio both for Upperunder and Low Cost Filmes, since we decided to co-produce it.

Bla bla bla bla... All this is kind of boring to most of you so whoever wants to know more about all we are doing, just drop by!

Here I leave you with an example of an institutional we did at Upperunder:



Have FUN!