Good Luck

With Serbian miners we descend hundreds of metres, deep into the earth. The diesel engines chug, stone is drilled and in the distance we hear explosions. It is always night in the copper mine. The semi-forgotten men find their counterparts across the ocean, in the tropical heat of illegal Surinamese gold mine Kiíki Nëígi. There the water pumps thud under the merciless sun; mud streams between a man’s fingers in the endless search for gold.

Ben Russell spent months in these mines to understand how people persevere. He filmed between light and dark, heat and cold, north and south thereby linking two disparate groups of labourers with more in common than they know. Good Luck is an attentive, earthy film about bodies, rock and sweat, about being lucky and freedom of choice as well as the sense of community that invariably develops under harsh conditions. This is the basis of our capital and Russell puts a human face to it.