Jade Miners

Jade has always been a valuable commodity in Asia. In the mountains in the north of Burma there are valuable deposits of jade. The area forms part of Kachin State, inhabited by many ethnic groups which found themselves embroiled in the Civil War in 2010 with the Burmese government. Jade mining was halted because of the conflict. Thousands of workers, however, went to the war zone in order to dig for illegal jade. It turned the region into a no-go area and the filmmaker Midi Z, who had so far made feature films in Burma, saw no opportunity to go and film there. It was far too dangerous.
He found an unusual solution. He asked people who were able to go into the area (because they belonged to a specific faction, group or gang) to take small cameras with them and to film the daily work of illegal mining. Out of that material, much of it of course unusable, he edited this film, which observes the honourable tradition of social documentaries in which hard-working labourers play the lead.