Crespo’s doc is a relatively brief, immersive journey into the lives of gold-panners living a destitute life in the jungles of Costa Rica. Exiled out of the national park where they formerly looked for gold, they get by on tiny fragments of gold dust. The quantities they manage to extract from the rivers are minimal. The panners, as a result, live a life of abejct poverty, clinging to a dream which seems completely illusory - a kind of fool’s gold. The narrative and visual style are determinably poetic, even whimsical. Over the course of a little less than an hour we glide through these marginalised people’s lives, the camera spying on them. There were times when it felt as though the film might have excavated these lives in more detail; all the same the film serves the purpose of classic documentary, taking the viewer into a world we will never know, revealing the harshness and cudged fortitude of people who exist beyond the mainframe of modernity.
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