Keyi Productions – ARTE
Winner in the audiovisual category of the journalism prize, this beautiful report gives a voice to young Filipinos who practice wild gold panning, sometimes at the risk of their lives.
On the scales of the local seller, it weighs barely eight grains of rice. However, it took hours to extract this tiny nugget of gold from the mangroves. The operation was carried out by two children, slender enough to slip to the bottom of a well dug in the ground. They are at the heart of this report visible on Arte.tv, Albert-Londres 2024 prize, audiovisual category.
Highlighting a little-known subject, carefully placed comments, judicious camera shots… The jurors were not mistaken in electing the film by Antoine Védeilhé and Germain Baslé, who testify here, without trying to darken it, of everyday life “small gold convicts” and decipher the economic circuit of ore in the Philippines, highlighting the different strata of society.
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Harmful economy
At the bottom of the scale, penniless parents take their offspring to explore the waters of swamps or marine reefs. A visit to their unsanitary house allows us to understand why they consider it legitimate to resort to child labor, a practice prohibited in the country. While they descend several meters deep, the toddlers skip school. Worse, around twenty gold miners die each year in the region. But death obviously does not exist in families, until it strikes…
Keyi Productions – ARTE
“They need money, it is a duty to buy them their gold”swears the village seller, who takes her part in this deleterious economy. This will not change without intervention from public authorities. For now, poverty is the law. And the little convicts return to the mine, without losing their smile. Without forgetting, for some, to pray before diving…
