Mining, and the environmental ravages and hardships exacerbated by resource extraction around the globe, has become a popular subject for documentary filmmaking in an age of depleted nature and the transnational inequalities of capitalism. Chris Gude’s Morichales, which had its world premiere in the International Competition at DOK Leipzig, sparks attention as a particularly deeply considered and poetic treatment of the controversial practice. Here, the metal sought is gold. Gude, who shot the film over thirteen years, immerses us deep in the jungles of southeast Venezuela, where miners have arrived on rafts down the Orinoco for years to seek out once-plentiful deposits of precious metal, their urgency in stark contrast to the slow processes of geology. Plenty of festival slots should follow for a sensitive, vivid and meticulously contextualised depiction of the current ills of the planet, colonialism’s legacy and exploitation in the lesser-examined South American context of the Guayana territory.
A fictional narrator (voiced by actor Jorge Gaviria) with a wide view of history and lyrical sense for myth and all of the paradoxes of human labour in this ancient environment of gradual erosion and transformations describes gold mining in Venezuela to us as an anthropological field report but also as a tragic story of survival, fragility and greed. New Yorker Chris Gude has already made several films in South America: Mambo Cool (2013) was about small-time drug dealers in Medellin, and Mariana (2017) depicted whiskey and gasoline smugglers on the Colombia-Venezuela border — both films that, like Morichales, applied a poetic as well as political lens to themes of trade, desperation, and goods fetishisation. Mining in the Venezuelan Guayana is also highly dangerous, and the intensive toil carries unreliable returns for the workers who come by raft hoping to feed their families, their religious faith not always enough to combat their low morale, in a place where there is a hole so deep for reaching elusive deposits it is treacherously susceptible to noxious gases and is called Four Dead Men.
An almost mesmeric attention to the rhythms and stages of extraction amid the brown flows of mud and sluiced water, supported by a subtle, atmospheric soundtrack by Maximilian Gude, combines with delicate hand-drawings and maps, Bolex images and visualisation of the workings of quicksilver and other chemical elements that capture the beauty inherent in nature’s alchemy. But any romance humans have attached to gold mining is offset by Gude’s socially and existentially conscious concern for a forest unable to quickly replenish itself, and scant recompense for the labour of miners. The system of sale and reward, or “profits without glory,” reduces metal to an export commodity whereby wealth accumulates far from its origin for those who risk the least, as it passes to buyers and out of the country.
The whole territory is connected by water, and rains make the flows rise and fall in ways increasingly unpredictable as the seasons react to the climate crisis. The film takes its title from moriche palms, reminiscent of the Tree of Life of Pemon Indian myth, which it is said once had a complete inventory of fruit prior to it being cut down and water from its stump flooding with world and disseminating its seeds. Legends of such abundance are a stark contrast to the economic deprivation Venezuelans now face, but somehow buoy the continued efforts of adventurers to scour the terrain for lucrative discoveries, their mining a kind of never-settled demand to the land as a provider, which is never offered any profit back in the chain of consumption or nurturing for renewal. The booms and busts of the gold economy have been part of the region there since 1846, but as Morichales beautifully conveys, its frenzied cycle of hope and despair is terribly out of synch with the slow, ancient geological processes of the earth, and the time it takes for the burst of brightness of an exploded supernova to be returned to shining gold melted down into measurable form and clasped in a human hand.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Chris Gude
Cast: Jorge Gaviria
Producers: Chris Gude, Felipe Guerrero
Editing, sound: Felipe Guerrero, Chris Gude
Music: Maximilian Gude
Production companies: Chris Gude (USA), mutokino (Colombia)
World sales: Filmotor
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition)
In Spanish
83 minutes
