New Eldorado

The two-thousand-year-old village of Rosia Montana of Romania belongs among its most picturesque as well as being one of its richest. In its immediate vicinity there are vast deposits of gold and silver. "That gold has become our curse," says one of the villagers when speaking about a project of the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, which with the support of its Canadian investors intends to wipe this picturesque hamlet off the map and build a giant mine. Among the items to be sacrificed will be an Orthodox church as well as a unique archeological site from the time of the Roman Empire. A third of the villagers have already been moved out, those remaining however do not intend to leave. This documentary film by Hungarian director Tibor Kocsis, acclaimed at the festival in Freiburg, contains cautionary footage from the year 2000, where from the Romanian gold mines leaked tons on cyanide into the Tisa River and decimated the fish population. The local people are afraid that a similar ecological catastrophe could occur there. Just to get an idea: the extraction of gold to produce just one ring contains twenty tons of highly toxic waste.