“The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Macine,” a documentary that is among the competing Chilean pics at the 20th Santiago Intl. Film Festival, sparkles as it follows a father and son who seek to better their lives.
Toto, one of the few remaining artisanal gold miners in the country’s remote Tierra del Fuego, claims to be 56 years old but he looks decades older. After years toiling in the cold and wet, he moves stiffly, his health failing. He’s afraid he won’t live to see his son finish building a gold harvesting machine that would ease their lives, especially his.
The international trailer of “The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine,” bowing exclusively in PvNew, opens with Toto speaking aloud as he writes in his journal, a habit he has formed in case he dies while working alone out in the field.
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Its director, Alfredo Pourailly, spent years visiting Tierra del Fuego on investigative missions until he met Toto and his son, Jorge. He discarded his original plans to profile various people in the far-flung region to focus only on the charismatic Toto and his son’s quest to single handedly build a gold harvesting machine. Jorge, a gaucho on the side with a penchant for bucking broncos, builds the machine virtually on his own, using the skills he has learned on the job as a welder in construction sites, pulling favors with friends and cousins, using a combination of scrap metal and purchased parts and even consulting YouTube to assemble this fabulous machine.
“I met Toto in 2015 but it was not until 2018 that I secured financing and started shooting in earnest,” says Pourailly of his directorial debut. With just a sound man by his side, he went back and forth for years to visit the father and son, filming for weeks at a time until 2023.
“It was a long, slow process but it allowed me to develop a rapport with my subjects and made them open up their lives to me,” he notes.
“With documentaries, one never knows how it will end, but I was just as anxious as Toto to see this machine finished, to have a happy ending,” he relates. Jorge could only work on the machine in his spare time and his promise to deliver stretched on for years. Toto’s frustration is palpable as he wonders if he’ll ever live to see it completed. Meanwhile, he sifts for tiny grains of gold which he sells to tourists. Nuggets are seldom found.
“I was keen to highlight the love between father and son with the hope that their story would reflect our own aspirations and inspire us to believe that we too can realize our dreams,” says Pourailly.
“The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine” had its world premiere at Canada’s Hot Docs festival and went on to win two prizes, including for Ibero-American documentary, at Mexico’s prestigious Guadalajara Film Festival.It was co-produced by Francisco Hervé of Chile’s Juntos Films (“Immersion”) and the Netherlands’ Annemiek van der Hell of Windmill Film (“Silence of the Tides”).
Bart van den Broek of post-production house Fever Film is an associate producer while Renato Manganello of Utopia Docs handles international sales.
The 20th Sanfic edition runs over Aug. 18-25.
