The Gold Machine (2022) is a dense documentary. Featuring an aging man’s poetic musings on his colonial ancestry and historical, geographical and sociological factual content, it demands attention. Writer Iain Sinclair worked on the documentary alongside director Grant Gee to adapt his <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gold-Machine/Iain-Sinclair/9781786079190">2021 book</a> of the same name, which explores the legacy of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair by retracing his journey in Peru.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Arthur was sent by the Peruvian Corporation of London to discover fertile land for coffee plantations, and he documented his expedition in his imperial, diaristic book In Tropical Lands (1895). His mission ultimately contributed to the gross exploitation of the surrounding land and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/battling-for-the-earth-the-huicholes">indigenous</a> Ashéninka people.
Gee melds documentary and fiction in this film. A fictional writer named Andrew Norton acts as the stylistic voice of Iain Sinclair. Norton speaks from his home, a block of flats on the despairing Hastings seafront. Sinclair’s daughter Farne also features, doubling as Andrew’s daughter, and she travels to Peru for her father as a messenger and family representative (in reality, Iain also travelled to Peru with Farne). This level of disconnect, at once based on reality and divorced from it, gives Norton’s thoughts a dramatic staging in the film: “I stalked the treadmill corridors of future nightmares,” he says whilst pacing the claustrophobic Hastings block and considering his bloody family history. Perhaps Gee used a fictional character in order to pursue this overriding tone of solitary, introspective melodrama. Would it feel too stark and earnest if Iain Sinclair voiced these thoughts himself?

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THE GOLD MACHINE (Dartmouth Films) (©Grant Gee) (06)

Sinclair is best known for his acclaimed London novel <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/54749/downriver-by-iain-sinclair/9780141014852">Downriver</a>, released in 1991, which explores the stories of the Thames shores (think dark surrealism and Thatcher’s legacy). The book won him the <a href="https://www.foyles.co.uk/public/biblio/prizedetails.aspx?prizeid=1014">James Tait Black Memorial Prize</a> the year of its release and remains influential for its ominous, offbeat prose and its practice of <a href="https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/">psychogeography</a>. In keeping with this, The Gold Machine is edited to give off a strong feeling of unease linked to the spaces captured. Shots from Peru include the distorted barbecued faces of the local delicacy <a href="https://travelfoodatlas.com/peruvian-guinea-pig-cuy-recipe">Cuy</a>, train journeys through mountainous landscapes, and the littered shores and areas inhabited by the Ashéninka. This looks like the footage of a disillusioned tourist and it is uncomfortable to watch through the eyes of the conflicted narrator. I think this is the intended effect.
It would be wrong to say the documentary is one-sided. The past and present are dually considered, and interviews with researchers and locals provide detail of the colonial mission to exploit the mineral-rich Peruvian land and the ensuing effects this had. We learn of the city of <a href="https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/la-oroya-peru-poisoned-town/">La Oroya</a> which suffers from toxic lead contamination due to poor mining practices, only worsened by the shirking of responsibility by US-multinational Doe Run Peru. We also hear from the Ashéninka and their call for financial reparations. Farne presents them with copies of the original papers which show the wrongful sale of land to the Peruvian Corporation. We are left hoping that these documents prove to be the solid legal evidence needed for remediation.
Throughout these interviews and stories of damage inflicted by the global North, the voice of Norton interjects a bit too often for my taste. In these moments, a shift in mood occurs as we find ourselves back to Hastings’s haunted, introspective walls. The dark building Andrew Norton speaks from feels stuffy and tired. Is colonial guilt the sticky feeling of going nowhere? This is a question we are left to grapple with. The corridors we see Norton pace through could be a metaphor for the linear routes Arthur Sinclair and the colonisers mapped for themselves. To counteract the colonial mindset of missions and linear routes, we need to reconfigure space as expansive, generous and giving. As activism and the fight for land restitution. Gee and Sinclair would agree, however, the documentary’s stylistic gloom sometimes feels at odds with a call for action. It is a difficult but necessary task, to acknowledge dark truths whilst nourishing hopeful futures.
<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/666841688?h=ffb6015152" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-mce-fragment="1"></iframe>
<a href="https://vimeo.com/666841688">The Gold Machine trailer 2022 (1080p)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user37932622">Hot Property Films</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.
Dartmouth Films present The Gold Machine in <a href="https://www.dartmouthfilms.com/thegoldmachine">select cinemas</a> from 2 September 2022.

THE GOLD MACHINE (Dartmouth Films) (©Grant Gee) (08)

In this blend of documentary and fiction, a writer follows his bloody family history back to the Peruvian land his grandfather exploited for profit.

The Gold Machine: Retracing colonial footsteps in Peru

Imagine a world that appears as if a child had perceived it. Where fear manifests itself in the most mundane of items, where the purity of magic prevails when the sun goes down, where everything exists with the charm of a children’s pop-up book imbued within it. Amanda Strong makes this fantasy a reality in her stop-frame animation Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes).
The film is based on the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, an Indigenous writer belonging to the Mississauga subtribe of the First Nations located in Ontario, Canada. Simpson is known for utilising the wonders of magic and spirituality to convey her passion for reviving Indigenous culture. In this story, we meet the eccentric Biidaaban and her 10,000-year-old shapeshifting companion Sabe, while they undertake a crucial quest to reclaim the beauty of Indigenous tradition and resist against a dark contemporary world that wants to bury it and forget.
Masked by the cover of nightfall, Biidaaban and Sabe take to the streets of a Canadian suburban town that appears ordinary on the surface, but is steeped in fantastical danger. The two characters attempt to collect sap from maple trees in order to make maple sugar, a task that had been practiced by their ancestors generations before. Throughout their journey, they are under the watchful eye of two hypnotically beautiful ghosts taking the shape of a wolf and a caribou – representing nature’s lost past and forming a key element of the story’s imagery.
The 19-minute film took two years to make and the attention to detail woven throughout the tale does not go unnoticed. Strong utilises the charms and quirks of traditional animation with such artistry in her miniature sets and puppets, and it injects this twee yet poignant story with the Hollywood auteurship of Tim Burton or Wes Anderson. Strong takes the art of cinematic visuals to otherworldly places that even transcend the need for dialogue. The majority of the narrative remains wordless, aside from the poetry that appears at the beginning and end of the story, sandwiching the message of tradition between realities of a contemporary world. Strong excels at executing a meaningful wordless narrative by turning it into a highly effective storytelling tool that deserves praise in and of itself.
There is an abundance of striking imagery running throughout the film to address a number of critical issues faced by Indigenous communities. These include fears around the loss of their culture, history and land – something that is cultivated in the film by recalling childhood fears. For instance, supposedly harmless everyday objects like a garden hose are brought to life and used to attack Biidaaban, standing in the way of her fight to reclaim her ceremonial heritage. Strong also draws attention to modernity’s oppression of Indigenous land through varying shots of electricity running through the depths of nature, a stark contrast forming between the two. The critiques do not end there, as it is evident Strong is alluding to the environmental problems the world is experiencing currently, where the ghosts of the wolf and the caribou, although beautiful, stand to represent the animals who have been chased out of their homes by land development – further acting as a metaphor for how Indigenous people has been treated, as their culture is too at risk of extinction. Strong has voiced that we are forgetting to honour the ancestors and animals that were here long before us, particularly in Canada where this story is set. This short film is a call to action, encouraging Indigenous viewers to prevent their culture from being drowned out by the white noise of modernity, to fight against land development and reclaim their rich history.
The characters of Biidaaban and Sabe embody this desired strength and tell their audiences there is no need to be afraid anymore. The final frame of the film reminds us that although tradition and modernity still stand north and south of one another, the fight to reclaim ceremonial custom lies between them in an electric space ready to collide. I would highly recommend this short for its beautifully creative form of storytelling and using this dreamlike world to unite a diverse set of cultures in understanding the issues impacting Indigenous communities that are far from fiction. It is a celebration of both the heritage of Indigenous culture and the artistry of animation.
Biidaaban is part of the Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival, which continues in London. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/native-spirit-uk-17728364903">Register here</a>. This film was created by CBC Arts and is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWjnYKyiUB8">available to watch</a> on their YouTube channel.

Biidaaban Still Large _newsite

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson&#8217;s story inspired the creation of this beautifully realised, but critically powerful movie that explores the most pertinent issues facing Indigenous peoples.

Biidaaban: A Powerful Indigenous Tale of Magic and Resistance Brought to Life

The <a href="https://nativespiritfoundation.org/13th-native-spirit-festival-12-20-october-2019/">13th Native Spirit Film Festival</a> will be running between 12 and 20 October 2019. This event deserves far more support and recognition as a platform for Indigenous cinema. Native Spirit works to champion and promote this unique category of filmmaking, and their chosen films delve into significant social and political issues with an artistic flair guaranteed to attract any cinephile.
One of the films being screened at this year’s festival is Max Baring’s revealing documentary Guarding the Forest, which couldn’t have been more timely. The summer of 2019 brought to light the severe ecological threat faced by our planet, as a social media storm highlighted the environmental crimes being committed in the <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2019/08/21/darkness-descends-on-sao-paulo/">Amazon rainforest</a>. Although natural forest fires are not uncommon during the dry season, the sheer degree of destruction showing an <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-49415973">increase in fires of more than 80%</a> points towards illegal deforestation through slash-and-burn methods. The reason for this deforestation lies with the agriculture industry creating land for their produce, and although this form of demarcation is illegal in Brazil, <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2210621-deforestation-in-brazil-has-rocketed-since-bolsonaro-became-president/">President Bolsonaro</a> has famously little concern for the planet’s wellbeing.
The recent international outrage is primarily concerned with the long-term environmental implications, but it is important not to lose sight of the people who are also battling the social fallout. Indigenous communities are losing homes and having their land destroyed for economic gain: if you thought climate action wasn’t getting enough media coverage, the human rights element of this atrocity certainly isn’t either. Max Baring’s festival film makes this issue known, giving a voice to the rainforest’s people.
Filmed in the Guajajara Indigenous territory within the depths of Brazil, Guarding the Forest holds a magnifying glass up to the devastation spreading through the Amazon rainforest due to the all-too-common prevalence of loggers. We are all aware of the impact deforestation has on our planet, but this documentary digs deeper into the direct social impact these atrocities have on local Indigenous populations and how members of the Guajajara community are fighting back.
The Guajajara Task Force call themselves “Guardians of the Forest” and view themselves as warriors serving to protect Mother Nature, aiming to negotiate with those who threaten her. The documentary exposes the politics surrounding the issues of deforestation and the eternal conflict between ecology and economy affecting the lives of so many. It highlights what used to be a lush beacon of greenery that provides us with 20% of the world’s oxygen, and that many justify its destruction because of the realities of a money-driven world. It is a film which surveys the fight between “individual, economic, private interests versus interests of the collective rights of Indigenous peoples” as Brazil’s first Indigenous congresswoman Joênia Wapichana puts it.
Following the election of President Bolsonaro and the power over land demarcation being transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture (an organisation whose main priority lies with farming) as opposed to the original organisation FUNAI (a foundation which aims to protect the rights of Indigenous people) logging has become far more of a cultural, as well as an environmental, threat.
Filmmakers put themselves on the front line as they utilise footage of fire, explosions and chaos to accentuate the destruction that the Guajajara Guardians are frequently facing. This serves to make the documentary all the more shocking, as it provides a melancholic reminder of the war we have declared on our own planet and its people. A simple yet effective use of Google Earth helps the audience visualise the severity of demarcation as vibrant green fades to lifeless brown in a fear-inducing image. The film runs for less than half an hour, but nevertheless offers viewers an intimate relationship with the Guardians, as cameras follow them through darkness and barren forests illustrating the reality of their fight. It effectively presents a more personal connection to environmental issues to strike the viewer on a human level.
This documentary does indeed emphasise the environmental crisis we all face, but its main focus is the Indigenous people of Brazil and the threats to their lives and homes. It also quite rightly sheds a light on the heroes putting their lives on the line to protect this precious ecosystem, something mainstream media channels have been failing to do. Using an environmental issue which inevitably impacts on the entire globe the documentary is a genius way of educating audiences (especially western) on cultural matters which would otherwise remain unexplored, bringing lesser known issues concerning Indigenous communities to the surface. As one of the Guardians so poignantly notes, “Our culture is our life, it’s in our blood, and nature is always part of our life” – and this thought-provoking documentary illustrates how deforestation is not only destroying land, but also destroying historical culture and human rights.
Guarding the Forest shows on 12th October at the Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival at 2-4pm at The Court Room, First Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/native-spirit-uk-17728364903">Register here</a>.

Guarding the Forest Still _newsite

Max Baring’s new documentary film recounts the struggles of the indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon, after the burning of the rainforests gained international attention.

The Human Cost of an Environmental Disaster: &#8216;Guarding the Forest&#8217; at the Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival

At the most unexpected moments, something is revealed that breeches the iron grip of life in China’s far-Western Xinjiang province. I find myself in a train carriage which is almost entirely <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/uyghur">Uyghur</a>. A few are keen to practice their English and have translation exercises to show me from their English textbooks. One reads, ‘Senior leaders of the Communist Party of China attended a ceremony on Sunday morning to pay tribute and lay wreathes at the Monument to the People’s Heroes, at Tianamen Square’. They look at me, searching for any expression that might betray a deeper doubt.
I wonder if they, too, sense their historical moment unravelling in the pages of two separate histories. I wonder it they, too, register revolution and conformity as two shades in their own Tianamen moment. As the carriages roll through territories of endless desert which Chinese surveillance has yet to master, they slowly scribble other questions: ‘Do you know about Uyghur culture?’ ‘Do you know what’s happening here?’ ‘Are you Muslim?’ The weight of all I have felt and wanted to express during my time here collides with their daily lived existence, one of deep injustice and untold trauma. A nightmare to be lived in stunned passivity.
They are keen for me to know of other tales in Xinjiang, of a people who have yet to vanish in the arena of endless revisionism. They tell me of role models they dream of emulating, names such as Rebiya Kadeer and Ilham Tohti. Dissidents and political prisoners. But these are only brief chapters, in volumes of their lives otherwise confessing to some new horror.
They speak of curbs on religious freedoms, the use of Islamic greetings and saying prayers at their mosques. Of attempts to purge Uyghur language of all functional use by prohibiting it as a medium of instruction for children, making it redundant within education, curbing its literature and limiting is value in future employment. I ask when they last learnt about Uyghur history and culture. They laugh in unison as if such a fantastical thought could only exist in the rhythms of a season long extinct.

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Xinjiang by AW Khan xin2 (1)

They visit their loved ones less, speak to each other less, confess their emotions less – even love less. Traditional wedding ceremonies, once joyous celebrations lasting days, attract unwanted scrutiny. Instead they have been become quieter, less communal, or in some cases easier to abandon altogether in the maze of travel permits, communications surveillance and national harmony. Love songs, like all other forms of artistic output, must pass through Chinese censorship. Poetic songs of love likened to the motherland have disappeared. Lands self-identified as sites of cultural expression over centuries, stand barren and unreachable now.
It all feels like a pantomime of reality, and yet government policy in Xinjiang excels in this zone where the totalising reach of a police state combines with farcical shows of national myth-making. It is strange that Xinjiang often feels like a war zone, despite totems to co-existence leering all around. I walk past mock security drills on an almost daily basis involving ordinary citizens; a dozen shopkeepers run out of adjoining units carrying clubs and surround a lone female. She is the only Uyghur present, accused of some crime – the symbolism resonating with the force of a thousand gunshots. I cannot fathom which scenarios they imagine might warrant such depth of preparation given how deep the security state is here.
There are police stations every few hundred metres in Xinjiang, with patrols occurring at all hours. In certain parts of Kashgar, there are emergency security points located every two shops. Cutlery is almost impossible to purchase, sharp objects are not for general sale, flammable aerosol cans and compressed gases are similarly banned – or in the case of cigarette lighters, confiscated at every checkpoint. The control is disturbing in its monotony.
The Old Town of Kashgar once housed hundreds of mosques within its winding alleyways alone, but following China’s destruction of the Old Town over the past decade, it is the enduring and iconic Id Kah mosque that stands defiantly, more restrained against the iconoclasm seen all around. The great glory of buildings, as expressed by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin in ‘The Lamp of Memory’, lay in ‘their lasting witness against men… their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things (…) which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties (…) connects forgotten and following ages with each other’. I recall his ode to cultural memory whilst stood within the grand shadow of Id Kah, wondering what testimony it might have offered in recent years, as its calls to prayer fall silent and a Chinese flag looms, unfurled over its dome.

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Xinjiang by AW Khan xin7 (1)

It is never worshippers entering the mosque nowadays, rather tourists lured to the fringes of Empire. Nowhere is this concentration of Han Chinese assimilation felt more oppressively than in Kashgar, where the relentless effort to remove localism and shared custom has produced a garish and sentimental theme park for domestic entertainment. They come and leave bearing their own testimonies of loyalty in an exotic land, of China in its moment of divine ascension.
In so many ways Xinjiang is where the dream of unified, one-nation Chinese renewal has reached full effect. A place where efforts to erase both the physical and emotional embodiment of Uyghur identity are codified into everyday interaction, or reformulated into entirely new experiences. I am reminded of this when an official in Kashgar readily explains away the absence of calls to prayer, or sites of prayer for the public: “These things cannot be asked. They don’t exist, as you can discover for yourself. We have brought development here.”
The Chinese are not the first to cast their attentions on this land, dismissing its people and culture with a weary and suspicious gaze. When disparaging the ‘vagrant tribes of hunters and shepherds, whose indolence refuses to cultivate the earth’, the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon was echoing much of European thought across the centuries. What is remarkable about China’s efforts in Xinjiang however, is the overwhelming will to infiltrate every nook and corner of Uyghur identity, and once there, to mark this infiltration as a site of perfect order.
These conquests to ‘harmony’ appear in ways both trivial and sinister, yet always oppressive in their reach. Chinese lanterns and flags, buffeted by an endless array of billboards and posters adorn virtually every Uyghur home, food stand, mosque, monument and civic building. When they are not physically gazing over the population, they appear etched on walls, embedded in clothes and carried at all times on ID cards. The reach even extends to graveyards, reminding both the living and the dead that this era of historical memory will be decidedly rewritten, emerging altered in a show of magnificence, or likewise falling into blank forgetfulness.

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Xinjiang by AW Khan xin3 (1)

The centuries-old labyrinthine streets of Kashgar have been razed to make way for a new order re-imagined during the frisson of a Sino-Orientalist orgy, climaxing in the seduction of domestic tourists by the new god of commercialism. A pastiche of imperial order reigns proudly to render older forms of memory redundant. It appears the function in destroying Old Kashgar was never simply to deprive Uyghurs of one of their most treasured forms of cultural memorialisation, but also to make the community more policeable. Larger streets, streamlined shop units, population transfers to areas outside of the old town, all combine to reshape history into something more manageable, less complex, less indigenous.
At times, the cultural devastation is quite literally embodied in the very stones that run through the city. Extracts from one of the most important works of Turkic literature, the Kutadgu Bilig, are imprinted onto the walls in Kashgar, removed of all context and Islamic wisdom. The effect is to strip the text of its original meaning and lyricism, replacing it with the obscenely menacing overtones of the Chinese state: ‘The bad is remembered for a curse, the good for praise. Decide for yourself which one you want’; or ‘Righteous conduct is a necessary condition for a man to rise in fortune’. One senses that it is not so much a celebration of Uyghur culture, rather a celebration of its absence; monuments intricately woven into the conception of a people and their place in history are targeted, confronted and razed as sites of political power.
It is a cruel irony that a culture rich in welcoming visitors over the centuries, has been destroyed to facilitate a frisson of sensationalism for the new wave of decadent traveller. A world where the artificial Arabesques and lurid refurbishments are violently reimagined, taunting any collective psyche that suggests something else once existed here. I am reminded of the words of Catherine Macartney, wife of the British consul in Kashgar in the early 1900s when noting the impressive diversity of the city: “One could hardly say what the real Kashgar type was.” I, too, am unsure of what the Kashgar type is, but I know for certain this is not it.
I think back to Id Kah and wonder again, what testimony would it bear in these times. What would it say about the hallowed deeds of men; what prayers half-expressed and unexpressed have kissed the shadows of its walls; and what hope would it give from the vast expanse of its own witnessed memory, to her people submerged in the shadow of the Han.