Release date: 10 de septiembre
Tierra sublevada: Oro Impuro
Fernando Pino Solanas is releasing a new documentary on the predation and plundering of natural resources. It’s the first part of a diptych that will be completed with the upcoming release of Oro negro.
07 de septiembre del 2009
After Social Genocide, The Dignity of the Nobodies, Argentina latente and La próxima estación, documentarian Fernando Pino Solanas’ fresco of contemporary Argentina is completed with Tierra sublevada, a work in two parts which are independent to each other: Oro impuro, which opens on September 10, and Oro negro, about the predation and plundering of mineral resources (metals and hydrocarbons) and the struggle against the increasing contamination.
The first film, Oro impuro, is a journey through some of the opencast exploitations with cyanide that corporations have installed in the Argentine Northwest (San Juan, La Rioja, Catamarca, Tucumán, Salta), and the neighboring towns’ reaction towards contamination. The film is told by its protagonists: engineers, teachers, farmers, natives, neighbors, and environmentalists, who make strong denunciations on plundering, and tell moving stories of resistance towards the predation caused by these corporations. Encouraged by the struggle of the Gualeguaychú assemblymen against the installation of the Botnia paper factory over the Uruguay River, the environmentalist movement managed to ban opencast mining with toxic substances in seven provinces: Chubut, Río Negro, La Pampa, Mendoza, San Luis, Córdoba, and Tucumán.
The film consists in an introduction, ten chapters and an epilogue. The prologue covers the colonial conquest and the reform of the mining legislation that took place in the 90s. The chapters are: 1) Mega-mining; 2) A Trip to Minera Alumbrera; 3) What They Take Away; 4) What They Leave Behind; 5) The Impoverished Life; 6) Bribes and Resistances; 7) Complicity and Justice; 8) The Power of Barrick Gold; 9) Water Is Worth More Than Gold; 10) Civic Assemblies; Open Epilogue.
Pino Solanas, who has recently been elected as a representative in the Buenos Aires City Legislature, is a renowned documentarian with an extended career in the genre, all the way from his clandestinely-shot, politically committed trilogy The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) - a landmark of political cinema - to his latest, controversial film La próxima estación, released in 2008.
His fiction films have also won awards at prestigious festivals: Tangos, the Exile of Gardel won the Special Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival and the Gran Coral in Havana (1985), The South won the Best Director Award at Cannes and, again, the Gran Coral at the Havana Film Festival (1998), and The Cloud also won an award at the Venice Film Festival (1998).
