Here some more exciting news from Sandgrains!
From the 26th of May until the 2nd of June the film will be at the Krakow Film Market, the industry section of the Krakow Film Festival!
We will be soon traveling to Poland!!!
Jordie is going to promote the film to Central and Eastern European broadcasters and distribution agents.
Anyone around that is attending as well?
Looking forward to meet you at the networking drinks with a nice polish beer in our hand :-)

Sandgrains has been selected for the International Green Competition a the Green Film Festival in Seoul, South Korea. This festival, running from May 9th to 16th, is unfortunately too far for us to attend but we hope that Koreans will enjoy it and if anyone has a friend in Seoul please pass on the news!

This is the announcement we have all been waiting for!
Sandgrains is finally READY!!!

It has taken a lot of time to iron out the final details. Having to replace music tracks when the edit has been closed is not an easy task. But Davide Pistoni and Mirco have done a truly fantastic job, and at the end of March we were able to finalise the audio and export the film to be prepared for distribution.

While we were waiting for the music, we have updated the trailer according to the edit and made it accessible in 7 languages on our website, and we cut the 52 minutes version of the film. The first version of 70 minutes has been made mainly for festival applications as they often require 60 min + in length to accept a film. While the 52min version is the one we will be distributing to the public, to broadcasters and distribution companies. 52 minutes is the most used international time standard for documentaries on TV and having the film formatted in this way will make it easier to place on the market. Making the 52 min version meant a little restructuring of a couple of scenes, the taking out of 3 characters, slimming down interviews, re-adapting the music and redoing the audio edit. Both versions of the documentary have also been subtitled in 7 languages: English, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, German and French and we are very grateful to all the people that have been helping us out in doing them: Corinna, Fiorella, Laura, Marie, Ana, Adan, Manuela, Benoit, Giorgia, João, Luis, Alice and N'dala, thank you so much!

The two 89GB and 84GB files have been brought to Stanleys Productions that have compressed them to create the masters of the DVDs, the Bluray and the digital download files. Then, also using the graphics by Lorenzo Dzieduszycki, they have printed 130 DVD copies and some Bluray Discs. Now we have just started sending out the perks to those of you that have donated to our project.

We have been invited to list Sandgrains in the Media Library of the Visions du Réel Documentary Film Festival in Switzerland. This event is one of the major documentary film markets in Europe and even though we have not been selected to screen the film at the actual festival we are very hopeful that the room dedicated to the Doc Outlook Market, where commissioners and buyers can watch a list of 350 noteworthy documentaries, can lead to something interesting.
The festival runs from the 19th until the 26th of April in Nyon, on the shores of Lake Geneve and Jordie will be going to represent Matchbox.
Here you can check out the page the festival has dedicated to our project.

Finally the Sandgrains trailer is finished!
In 4 years of production we have gone through many versions, every time updating it with the latest.
Now we finally got to the final version, edited with material from the final cut of the film.
You can watch it in the 7 different languages the documentary will be released in.

A huge thanks to Jordie who edited it, Filippo who graded it, Mirco for the amazing audio and tracks and last but not least all the supporters who made the film possible.

You are invited to join us at the very first sneak preview of Sandgrains!

We are finally ready to show it to the public and we wish to have an impact on those that will take important decisions regarding our oceans in the following days and weeks.

The event will be at the Goethe Institute in Brussels, just a couple of blocks away from the European Parliament.

Invite all your friends and lobby your MEPs to come along and take a stand on the upcoming Common Fisheries Policy Reform! Now we can change it! Next time will be in 10 years!

Lorenzo Dzieduszycki has been working the whole summer and just finished the final version of the movie poster!
He started by processing one of Francesca's pictures and then skillfully decontextualized and elaborated it graphically.

Here below you can see a digital copy. We like it a lot! What do you think?

Today in Italy in the Saturday supplement of Repubblica you can find the photo-essay from Cape Verde.

Photos by Francesca Tosarelli and article by Alessia Gallione.

The work has been created in coproduction with the Sandgrains documentary and the article explores the conjunctions of sand gathering and the construction industry.

Since back from Cape Verde Mirco Buonomo, our sound recordist and music composer, has been working on creating the sound track for the documentary. We are planning to share with you his compositions. This is the fourth: GreenAttack, this track has been designed for Greenpeace actions filmed during the documentary, pure adrenaline scenes in drum and bass style. At present this is the last music track, we will come back on september with new tracks recorded in Cape Verde, so.. stay tuned!

Since back from Cape Verde Mirco Buonomo, our sound recordist and music composer, has been working on creating the sound track for the documentary. We are planning to share with you his compositions. This is the third: Dead shark, this track has been designed for scenes with illegal sharks fishing in the documentary.

Since back from Cape Verde Mirco Buonomo, our sound recordist and music composer, has been working on creating the sound track for the documentary. We are planning to share with you his compositions. This is the second: Underwater, this track has been designed for underwater scenes in the documentary.

Amazing, Francesca has done it again!
Sandgrains published all over France in the Courier International, the weekly magazine!

Visit this link to read the full article in French on the online version.

Since back from Cape Verde Mirco Buonomo, our sound recordist and music composer, has been working on creating the sound track for the documentary. We are planning to share with you his compositions in the next few weeks. The first one we are making public is Charco Bay. For this track Mirco has worked on processing the sound material recorded on the beach of Charco, during the hard work of the sand gatherers.

Just now we came back from the LAST 2 DAYS of production for the documentary!

We spend a few days with Zé and his son Sion, went to a football game and on a day trip on the islands in front of Gothenburg's coast. Here below you can see a few screenshots from the footage we have taken.

We have now finally closed the chapter of the production and are entering the complex process of post-production and distribution.

Naiara Seara, our editor has been working hard on sifting through our 50 ours of material and is now working on the rough cut of the film. It is an exciting experience to see the film coming to life after almost 4 years of work on this project!!

On the 19th of May we got our first publication on the Guardian Weekend Magazine!
Hannah Booth wrote a column to go with a photo of Francesca's Sandgrains gallery in the Big Picture section.

Here below is the tearsheet of the double spread page, and if you want to see the online version visit this link.

The Sandgrains Team has been invited by Pong-Pesca and Associação Caboverdeana to present the project in Lisbon. More than 80 people attended the event and most of them staid on for the traditional Cape Verdean dinner and music. The event ended with a long and felt discussion about the topic of the film and with an invite for us to return to lisbon for the launch of Sandgrains in Portugal. For those with Facebook here is a gallery by the photographer os the hosts.

A special thanks goes to Gonçalo Carvalho, Catarina Grilo for organizing the event, and to Helena Pimentel for her simultaneous translations!

Thanks to all those that came to see the new screener and the photo exhibition by Francesca.

This is what Shark Diver writes about Sandgrains:
'We tend to admire and promote those who take the craft of documentary work with all the seriousness it deserves and Sandgrains is one of those well crafted works that deserves a first, second, and third look."

if you want to check it out visit this link

Gabriel's guest blog on the Greenpeace site!

Fish tales from the high seas of Senegal

At the end of April we have been filming in Brussels to interview politicians and lobbyist working on influencing the Common Fisheries Reform. Super Thanks to Jo Jo Lam that has been our camera operator and Christophe Van Der Eecken who took the job of making the photo backstage,

Come to the Sandgrains event @ Feng Sushi, Borough Market, on Sunday the 22nd between 3.30 and 5.30pm! There will be sneak previews of unreleased footage, a photoexhibition of Cape Verdean sand miners, and of course some sustainably sourced sushi. 

http://www.fengsushi.co.uk/time-for-tea/win-tickets-to-the-preview-of-sandgrains/