Director Olivier Weber's "Cursed for Gold" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last night on May 16th. The documentary film reveals the life of those who live in the French Amazon forest amongst the dangers of gold digging. It explains the ongoing circle, as Weber called it, of prostitution, drug trafficking, and health and environmental problems that go along with this realm. Weber speaks with those who are affected negatively by the gold digging as well as with those who do the g...

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Synopsis A new gold rush is sweeping through the Amazon rainforest where scores of women and men hunt for nuggets and specks of gold. But this race for gold is bringing on the destruction of one of the last earthly paradises, the world’s largest tropical forest, the lungs of our planet, where everything and anything can be paid in gold. As a result, a gold ingot cycle has developed—with its batch of insolvents, prostitutes, godfathers, traffickers, whether in French Guiana, Brazil or Surinam...

BC: Olivier Hello, why did you choose this topic, the world of gold? After I travelled to the Amazon, I was struck by this peculiar world of gold. The men who live around the gold mines in the forest live in extremely difficult conditions. While very few live by, some become very rich overnight. A war opposes the two-no holds barred. The surrounding brutishness is massive. And yet, they are so well organized! In the depths of the Amazon, the lungs of our planet, the gold mines are surrounded b...