The Shadow of Gold

FILM REVIEW

The Shadow of Gold It’s easy to scratch the surface of gold — in its pure form it’s a very soft metal — and at times it feels as though the documentary The Shadow of Gold does merely that. Wide-ranging but less than 80 minutes long, the film touches on the American gold rush of the 19th century (and its own long shadow), the environmental destruction wreaked by mines as far apart as Canada and China, and the difficulty of trading in crueltyfree gold; unlike blood diamonds, “blood gold” can be mixed and melted until it’s indistinguishable.

Co-directors Denis Delestrac, Robert Lang and Sally Blake criss-cross the planet to shed light on the shiny substance. It’s fortunate that unlike say Bitcoin, which causes a lot of eyes to glaze over, gold’s use as a currency can be easily under- stood by almost anyone — a Roman centurion, a Spanish conquistador, an early Bond villain or your aunt Sylvia. It’s money you can wear!

But a thirtyfold increase in the price of gold since the early 1970s has set off a hunt for more of it. We see residents near Yellowstone National Park trying to stop mining in their area; visit the Mount Polley mine in British Columbia, site of a 2014 environmental disaster; and learn that “artisanal gold,” which sounds respectably quaint, in fact refers to small-scale mines that use dangerous mercury to extract the gold.

Like many an eco-doc, this one concludes on a semiupbeat note, with a profile of a fair-trade jewelry store in Toronto, and a Nobel chemistry laureate whose work could mean a less damaging technique for gold extraction. One thing for certain is that humanity’s appetite for the metal is not going away. ≤≤≤