A collapsing stage, an old cigarette machine and a few bits of rotting furniture were mostly all that was left inside the old Clayhouse Inn.

None of it fazed filmmaker Milton Raposo.

The music lover thought the once popular nightclub was the perfect subject for a documentary. It had been sitting derelict since a fire in 2002, but was once the hub of the Bermuda music scene.

“With permission from the building owners, I went there to make a short film, Frozen Music,” he said. “They did warn me to be careful. When I went there, I thought, if only these walls could talk.

“Stevie Wonder played there, so did Gladys Knight and a lot of other famous people.”

The North Shore, Devonshire club was a great social equaliser over the decades it was in operation, he added.

“You could have the governor and an electrician sitting together to watch a performance. Music is that thing that crosses all kinds of boundaries.”

He only went there once himself, back in the 1990s.

“I was a young adult,” he said. “I went there to see a DJ that I liked. I don’t even remember who the DJ was. I remember I felt a bit of trepidation, because the place was in decline and developing a reputation. It was a nightclub and very dark inside.”

The public will get the chance to sample Frozen Music and snippets from some of Mr Raposo’s other films as part of the Historical Heartbeats Lecture Series next week.

“I believe that filmmaking should be about shining a light into dark corners of society and history,” he said.

“Now, it is so easy to make a movie using your smart phone or a cheap, inexpensive camera. We make these cute YouTube videos about people diving off cliffs into the water. That’s fine, but maybe we should also be going deeper and highlighting things people don’t know about.”

Mr Raposo will also show part of Fabric, his documentary on the history of Portuguese people here, at Tuesday’s lecture in St George’s.

He’s been working on the film for five years.

“There have been a lot of fits and starts,” he said. “A year into the project I started [my film production company] Method Media Bermuda. I’ve been concentrating on that and have a lot of commercial clients now.

“Recently, I’ve gone back to working on Fabric. To be honest, I’ve had a hard time finding experts to talk about Portuguese history.”

But he said he had the attention of the Portuguese government.

“I know they have been checking up about it in a roundabout way,” he said. “People have told me. I’ve gotten some archival material from the cultural affairs department in Lisbon. William Wilberforce Museum have sent me one or two images as well to talk about the Portuguese involvement with the slave trade. I want the Heartbeats Lecture to be a way to update people on the project, but it won’t just be about Fabric.”

Mr Raposo’s parents immigrated from the Azores in the 1960s. While his family were always proud of their heritage, he didn’t really grow up knowing much about Portugal.

“I used to think all the Portuguese did was farm,” he said. “When I got older, I started to wonder what the Portuguese did before they came to Bermuda. What is my history?

“When I started making this film I decided to go right back to the Middle Ages. I’m surprised at how much we have done as a people. For instance, I didn’t know that the Portuguese empire was one of the longest existing in Europe. That really surprised me.”

He said in days gone by many people of Portuguese heritage in Bermuda were ashamed of their background, but that’s changing.

“Nowadays younger people fly the flag so much it’s almost in your face. Not that there is anything wrong with that, they are just very in tune with the fact that they are Portuguese.” He came into his film career along a meandering path, as his first love was music.

“I remember listening to the radio all the way through Hurricane Emily in 1987,” he said.

“There was a ZBM radio personality called Jane Young and I was fascinated by how much she knew about music. Of course, she played everything that was popular at the time.”

The experience inspired him to take a video production job with ZBM right after high school.

“I was doing everything from camera to working the master controls,” he said. “We did everything in rotation so I got to learn different things about video production.”

After a few years of that, he moved to London to work at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, a revamped opera house.

“It was a stressful, high-octane job, but I loved it,” he said. “All the celebrities played there and I got to see them all including Radiohead and Elton John. But London breaks you after a while and I wanted to come home.”

He returned to Bermuda after six years and found a job as a producer at Panatel Ltd working on shows such as The Learnalots. Then he really saw video production’s potential as a career.

“I saw what it could do and I really became interested,” he said. “I decided to pursue it further.”

He studied film production at Digital Film Academy in New York City and worked as a producer for LookBermuda, before starting Method Media Bermuda.

“I want to use this Historical Heartbeats lecture to let people catch a glimpse of my films,” he said. “I want to show people what my work is about and who I am.”

Watch parts of Mr Raposo’s films in the World Heritage Centre at 6pm. The event is free.

He’s looking for experts on Portuguese history to interview, and families to share their stories. Contact him via e-mail: milton@methodmediabda.com