Children of the Mines
Garcia, Maria
Children of the Mines By Maria Garcia Documentary is the social conscience of cinema, and in the hands of masterful, largely uncelebrated filmmakers, it remains a stirring articulation of life on...
...The Devil's Miner illustrates the devastating effects of child labor, of children assuming the burdens, financial and emotional, that properly belong to their parents...
...Davidson and Ladkani did not set out to put faces to the dry statistics of poverty or child labor...
...Actually, we found a genuine sadness in Potos...
...The boys' mother, who makes $25 a month guarding the miners' equipment, either lacks the imagination to move elsewhere or is overcome by the melancholia that permeates the thin air of Potos?, the neighboring town, and Cerro Rico itself...
...In the portentous lives of the Vargas boys and the adult miners, all indigenous Quechua speakers, we see the vestiges of centuries of colonialism...
...It would have been too easy to blame somebody," Davidson declares...
...Her previous article for this magazine, "Through a Kurdish Lens, " was about Bahman Ghobadi...
...about the fact that these families have no choices...
...Plunging along with them into the mineral dust that will despoil the lives of the boys, we also sink into despair...
...Vargas does not question the necessity of Basilio filling his father's shoes...
...Fueling that despair are the 800 other children who toil in the mines, and whose faces we can only imagine: Cerro Rico ("rich pinnacle"), known to the locals as "the mountain that eats men alive," has 20,000 other tunnels the filmmakers didn't explore...
...The miners accept that they will die by the time they're forty, and Mrs...
...It is rare to see a personal film about a real family in a Third World country," Davidson said in our recent interview...
...But don't expect cathartic moments...
...This results in a grainy projected image, but the suspense of the documentary quickly erases this imperfection...
...Maria Garcia, a New York City-based film critic, writes regularly about human rights filmmaking...
...It was then that Basilio felt compelled to work in the mines and, later, to take his younger brother there...
...Fine documentaries like The Devil's Miner aren't crafted to deliver an "ah hah...
...Each is presided over by the devil, whose statue is littered with offerings from the children and the adult miners...
...Los Indios worked the mines then, and they work them now...
...At any moment, the child miners-not to mention the filmmakers-could be shut in by an explosion in a neighboring tunnel, suffocate from dust, or die from the release of poisonous gas...
...It would have been impossible to tell that story without going into the mines...
...Because of the closeness of the tunnels, Davidson and Ladkani used a very small-format video camera...
...Children of the Mines By Maria Garcia Documentary is the social conscience of cinema, and in the hands of masterful, largely uncelebrated filmmakers, it remains a stirring articulation of life on Earth...
...The few dollars a day that Basilio and Bernardino earn enable them to attend school, but they must hide the fact that they work in the mines or risk the ridicule of the other students...
...At one point, the screen goes dark as the filmmakers and the boys run headlong down a narrow tunnel to escape a collapse...
...When asked what he wishes for the future, Basilio says "a father," and rightly so: When his was killed, he became father to his two younger siblings...
...In the sixteenth century, Cerro Rico fed the Spanish empire...
...The Devil's Miner puts Bolivia on the map, but more importantly it maps an evil without ever sacrificing the humanity of its subjects...
...Instead, they resemble an emotional free fall, in this case down a Stygian tunnel to a nearly depleted silver mine...
...There is no narration in The Devil's Miner, no talking heads enumerating the failures of the Bolivian government...
...When directors Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani climbed into a Bolivian mine with two adolescent boys, brothers Basilio and Bernardino Vargas, to film by the light of their open-flame headlamps and acetylene torches, documentary once again fulfilled its promise...
Vol. 70 • May 2006 • No. 5
