\t\u201cThe Fabulous Gold Harvesting Macine,\u201d 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. \tToto, one of the few remaining artisanal gold miners in the country\u2019s 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\u2019s afraid he won\u2019t live to see his son finish building a gold harvesting machine that would ease their lives, especially his. \tThe international trailer of \u201cThe Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine,\u201d bowing exclusively in Variety, 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. \t \tIts 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\u2019s 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. \t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \t\u201cI met Toto in 2015 but it was not until 2018 that I secured financing and started shooting in earnest,\u201d 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. \t\u201cIt 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,\u201d he notes. \t\u201cWith 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,\u201d he relates. Jorge could only work on the machine in his spare time and his promise to deliver stretched on for years. Toto\u2019s frustration is palpable as he wonders if he\u2019ll ever live to see it completed. Meanwhile, he sifts for tiny grains of gold which he sells to tourists. Nuggets are seldom found. \t \t\u201cI 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,\u201d says Pourailly. \t\u201cThe Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine\u201d had its world premiere at Canada\u2019s Hot Docs festival and went on to win two prizes, including for Ibero-American Documentary, at Mexico\u2019s prestigious Guadalajara Film Festival.\u00a0It was co-produced by Francisco Herv\u00e9 of Chile\u2019s Juntos Films (\u201cImmersion\u201d) and the Netherlands\u2019 Annemiek van der Hell of Windmill Film (\u201cSilence of the Tides\u201d). \tBart van den Broek of post-production house Fever Film is an associate producer while Renato Manganello of Utopia Docs handles international sales. \tThe 20th Sanfic edition runs over Aug. 18-25. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe Fabulous Gold Harvesting Macine,\u201d 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\u2019s remote Tierra del Fuego, claims to be 56 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4943,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}