Boubacar Sangaré’s film documents without embellishment the life of a young gold miner in Burkina Faso

Rasmané, 16, hopes to “strike gold” on the gold panning site of Bantara, in Burkina Faso. The filmmaker Boubacar Sangaré followed him on a quest that he shares with thousands of other Burkinabè children.

Gold of life, in theaters since June 5, is the life of a teenager and a gold miner filmed over three years by the Burkinabe filmmaker Boubacar Sangaré. His first feature-length documentary for cinema is a portrait of Rasmané, whose youthful face we first discover at the age of 16. He works on the Bantara gold panning site, in the southwest of Burkina Faso. To “achieve gold”, an expression used to designate the quest for the precious metal, he bends to a harsh environment and risky activity.

The possibility of a fatal accident in the galleries is an inevitable subject between young and old. But this is the price to pay for Rasmané, who no longer lives with his parents and aspires to gain his independence. Gold panning is the guarantee of this. By making the work of this child gold miner the subject of his documentary, Boubacar Sangaré recalls that thousands of others toil in the gold mines in Burkina Faso and offers himself, in the process, a sort of cinematographic alias. The world of gold panning is familiar to him. At 13, the director sold water at one of these mining sites.

Sangaré uses wide shots to show, from all angles, the place where Rasmané works: a succession of huts with dusty blue tarpaulins during the day and a plethora of small lights at night. The medium shots are those of conviviality, those moments where we can discuss everything and nothing. The oldest say that it is deadly to come across living gold when you are in search of inanimate gold, the grail.

Information is also exchanged on the operating situation, such as the threatening arrival of “the white machine”. Rasmané’s little friends also dream of “dig as deep as white”, before quickly coming back down to earth. The difference between artisanal and industrial exploitation being comparable to the “distance between the moon and the sun”, wisely notes one of the young gold miners.

Finally, in the galleries, it is the tight shots on Rasmané’s face, sometimes entirely immersed in this water which is necessarily pumped more slowly with a homemade device, which illustrate the intensity and dangerousness of the task.

Rasmané thus ages in front of Boubacar Sangaré’s camera. The teenager is the actor in a daily life marked by monotony: we prepare our rice and beans, we eat, we chat a little with our friends and the adults, we go down into the mine then start up again for a new day. Punctuated by the hope of bringing back a few grams of gold, the days and nights follow one another endlessly. The beauty of the image contrasts with this life that is both admirable and tragic, captured in a raw way, without artifice. The soundtrack, largely made up of ambient noise alone, bears witness to this.

With Gold of life, Boubacar Sangaré documents, once again, the limited prospects offered to all the Rasmané who constitute the majority of the youngest continent on the planet, Africa.

Gender : documentary
Director: Boubacar Sangaré
Distribution : Rasmané Tall
Country : Burkina Faso, Benin, France
Duration : 1h24
Exit : June 5, 2024
Distributer : The Caravan Films