Burkina Faso, formerly known a Upper Volta, is poor and land-locked. It has gold, though, and if you live in a poorer country, that creates attractive employment opportunities.
Dreams of Dust is a French-Canadian movie about someone from Niger who comes to Burkina Faso in search of work. Mocktar, our hero, arrives about 20 years after the country’s gold rush, and he runs into petty corruption almost immediately. He has to pay in order to get the job. It’s hard work, literally breaking rocks in the hot sun, but it is a job. Some of his co-workers are seasonal, looking for gold during the dry season and returning to their farms in the rain, but Mocktar stays on.
The movie is really slow, but the cinematography is gorgeous. The scenes of people going down into mining shafts are amazing – people seem to be swallowed by the desert.
As with so many of these West African stories, the underlying theme is greed. Money changes everything, especially when it’s gold. “The gold that we risk our lives for goes to the whites,” one character says, and that, in a way, is the summation of the lives of too many people in the world.
Next up: the tiny republic of Togo.
