Today the 'Sandgrains' project and Matchbox Media Collective are featured in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Bologna section.
Many thanks to Fernando Pellerano who wrote the article!

Just a few lines to share the latest news before leaving for Cape Verde ...

Thanks to everyone who participated and made ​​the event in Bologna possible, it has been a great success! Some very welcoming friends have opened 3 adjacent houses in the historical center of the city and offered canapés and refreshments to more than one hundred people who attended the two presentations by Matchbox Media and Sandgrains.

The evening brought new ideas and connections and allowed us to crowdfund £1,114 for the production of the documentary! THANKS SO MUCH TO EVERYONE!!

The next day we got some more good news!

Finally, after various meetings, the British NGO 'Global Ocean' donated £1,180 to 'Sandgrains' an amount that will cover the travel and equipments costs of Andrew, our underwater cameraman.

In short, the end of this year is giving us solid hopes regarding the practical possibilities of  crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. At the moment we reached £8,026 and the total target is £10,000, with a total of 88 donors!

There is only one more week to go until the end of our crowdfunding campaign and there are real possibilities to reach the target!

We are asking you all one last effort! Please forward this project to friends and family, share it on social media, or if you can, contribute with a donation!

In the meantime, we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

The Leading Cape Verdean Diaspora News Site just published an article on Sandgrains by Richard Webb.

The sita has ½ million visitors and 1 million pages read monthly.

Follow this link to read the entire article.

Emanuela Bonchino of Rai News 24 (Italian National Broadcaster News Channel) interviews Francesca Tosarelli and Jordie Montevecchi of Matchbox Media Collective. The news piece covers Sandgrains as our main crowdfunded project, strategies of the collective and photography of Lampedusa and Occupy LSX.

Thanks to Riccardo Frugone that made it possible!

Here is the video! Also with English subtitles.

Jordie Montevecchi just came back from his job in Afghanistan! He was working on assignment for Raw-News and Sky News Italy as camera operator and editor and living in the military base of Herat. Here below he collected some thoughts. And here you can see some of the work done while embedded with the Italian Army

 I had been searching for spectacular imagery, labouring under the illusion that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of responsibility to understand the events at hand.
How did this spectacle come about? What do this scenes of destruction, replete with shouts and blood, mean to express? What forces brought them about? And who will monitor them? We, the correspondants and reporters? No. The dead will barely have been buried, the wrecks of incinerated cars will have just been cleared away and the streets swept of the broken glass, and we will have already packed our bags and moved on, to where others are burning cars, shattering shop windows, and digging graves for the fallen.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus, 2007

Herat - Afghanistan
I arrived on the luxury flight bringing the President of the Italian Senate, so I dodged the 18 our and famously uncomfortable army cargo to Camp Arena. But flying on the cargo gets you an introduction to what it means being embedded. You see the soldiers, their combat jackets, the machine guns, you sit with them and try to communicate through the noise of the plane. I got there without having this introduction.

 We landed early in the morning and the job started immediately with its running around. Film the president, film the general, film the soldiers, film their parades, drop your bags and run into the helicopter. Noisy. Packed with soldiers and journalists following the president. All the cameramen sitting at the back, trying to get a clean shot through the other cameras.
Thats how it started, one single event over-covered by and created for the news, and many other stories that remained untold. Working as embedded camera operator has been one of my most exciting experiences, it has enriched me personally and professionally, but it also got me closer to the world of how news are created.
With the army you can not tell or show whatever you want, just because you are in a war zone and can only go where they go (so you are told), or you go with the car of an Ngo, but stay just long enough to film their project and leave for security reasons, so you don't give time for someone to organise a kidnapping. You never stop at the side of a long road with a couple of compounds sitting on its edge. You never go into one of these cob houses lying in the dust.

Afghanistan is a fascinating country, when you fly low over it on a helicopter you can get a quick grasp at how magnificent its mountains are, how dry its deserts, how green the valleys around the precious water. But what lives in it you don't see. You see shops, kids and motorbikes from inside the armoured vehicle, and look at them through a grid, because children have fun throwing stones at the military convoys. They know the soldiers wont react, their machine gunner on the top is instructed to wave his hands whens he sees people. "The kids always reply - told me once a young commander - When they grow up, they stop; instead they look at you, intensely.

watch the videos  I  view the screenshot gallery