I Think It’s Like a Human Life
“Everything is difficult.” As she speaks, Aagi bends over a cook fire, preparing supper for a crew of gold prospectors. “I’m the only woman and have to cook for many men,” she goes on, “This is a tough situation, I think. I’ve never cooked so much.”
Cooking isn’t the only difficulty Aagi faces. As revealed in the film Price of Gold, the current excursion employing her doesn’t have a schedule or even a specific goal so much as it has hope. Or, as the gold digger Khuyagaa puts it, the workers have dreams, dreams that come with a price. ““They say dreams cost nothing,” he says in voiceover as you look out on what seems the endless Gobi Desert in Mongolia “But today, you have to pay for your dreams. I think first you have to find the money, to make our dreams come true.” The frame cut to a close shot of Khuyagaa as he draws on his cigarette, backed by a pile of dirt and rocks, the result of his labor, the earth turned inside out.
Khuyagaa squints in the harsh sunlight, a contrast to the environment where he spends much of his day, inside holes. The film begins inside such a hole, the camera peering down into a long narrow opening, then cutting to a shot of the men inside it, Khuyagaa and his fellow diggers at work with shovels and picks. “Check whether you can see gold or not,” one says to another, in this close dark space barely illuminated by their helmet lamps. “Prospecting for gold is nothing but a gamble,” notes Khuyagaa.
Screening at Maysles Cinema this week, Price of Gold looks at many kinds of prices, material, emotional, and spiritual. Whether framed by daylight or darkness, above ground or below, Khuyagaa and his coworkers face the unknown.
One shot shows them sleeping with only their heads shaded, poked underneath the jeep they’ve used to reach their desert digging spot, others show them climbing down into holes or setting dynamite charges. They do their best with a broken drill, they scoop their rice out of old plastic bowls. They share laughs and suggest what they’d like to do with Aagi. They wrestle in the dust, they argue briefly and they forget.
The team is financed by two bosses, Usukhuu Akh and Ochiroo Akh, who decided where to dig and for how long. “Our ancestors had a good tradition,” says Usukhuu, “The earth wasn’t exploited. We don’t have a choice, we’re simply poor. Life in Mongolia is tough, gold digging is a fight for survival.” Such awareness doesn’t make their struggle any easier.
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