Reveka

In Bolivia, four miners who hold a family concession descend each day into the bowels of the “man-eater”. Over five centuries, the Cerro Rico has swallowed up millions of miners, Indian and African slaves and indigenous people, under Spanish domination. In the magnificent opening panorama, a storm is brewing but what we hear are the detonations of dynamite. The miners count the number of explosions so as not to return too soon. This archaic and dangerous practice is matched only by the lucidity they all have about the likelihood of an accident. What first suggests the fragility of the site and the men is the filmmakers’ handling of shadow and light – a fire lit near to the well, or the half-light of the inner hell. The towering mountain, so the newspaper says, is under threat of collapse. Soon vulnerability is visible everywhere, in the cemetery for silicosis victims and even at the tattooist’s, whose needle begins to resemble a miniature pneumatic-drill. Reveka (Rebecca), the name of the concession that Hilarion manages, rings a Hitchcockian note and is a haunted place: the miner is convinced that the souls of his colleagues who died in the mine still wander there; is it only a coincidence that the miner’s daughter is reading The Three Little Pigs, who repeatedly move house in search of an illusory solidity? (Charlotte Garson)