At All Costs | The pressure on academic students

The use of performance-enhancing drugs among young students seems to be increasingly common. In this documentary director Juul Op den Kamp delves into the world of young students who want to make career at all costs. Even if that means they have to put their physical and mental health aside.

"If you can make it there you can make it anywhere"
'At All Costs' (original title in Dutch: 'Onder druk') portraits a group of New York students who are about to storm the labor market. The competition is fierce and the expectations sky high. For many a pill seems to be the solution to use their full potential. You're focused, creative and can work through the middle of the night without getting tired.

'At All Costs' shows the dark side of the performance-based system in New York with nocturnal work-through sessions, nerve-wracking reviews and self-critical monologues. Observed through the eyes of a performance-enhancing drug dealer. What effects do performance enhancing drugs have on the lives of young people? And how do they deal with this?

Juul Op den Kamp (1992) graduated in 2014 as a producer at the Dutch Film Academy, won the FPN producer award with 'If Mama Ain't Happy' (2014), which was also eligible for an Academy Award and won many prizes at festivals worldwide. Immediately after graduating, she received a Fulbright-VSB and Prince Bernard Culture Fund scholarship for obtaining a master's in documentary direction at Parsons University in New York, where she graduated in 2016 with a short essayistic documentary (Where Memories Live, 2016). After New York she developed an interdisciplinary anthropology film series in the Philippines with Chemical Youth and ERC and directed a 70-minute documentary about the Philippine pharmaceutical industry (Sweet Medicine, 2017). As a freelancer she works in New York and Amsterdam, she directed commercials for the Anne Frank House, Vice Virtue and Storyboard, among other things, and produced for NRC and Mals Media. She is currently developing a new documentary. Juul focuses on universality in international social stories, in an alternative narrative form.

Watch the Dutch version of the documentary on https://www.vpro.nl/onderdruk

Director: Juul Op den Kamp
Research/Producer: Steffie van Rhee
DOP: Raquel Salazar Foster
Consulting Producer: Ilja Willems Bureau NY .tv
Editor: Berend Boneschansker
Sound Design: Gijs Domen
Music: Ricky Cherim
Grading: Remi Lindenhovius
VPRO Redacteur: Martien Vlietman Francine Van Der Lee
VPRO Producer: Karin Vermeulen
VPRO Online eindredacteur: Lea Fels

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