The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine review – scavenger’s story reveals a rich seam to mine

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Alfredo Pourailly De La Plaza’s absorbing documentary about an ageing Chilean gold panner is meticulously detailed and doubles as its own act of visual prospecting Out on the remote archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in Chile, Toto Gesell holds on to a profession that hails from bygone times: gold prospecting. Every day, come rain or shine, he puts on his rubber boots and heads to a local creek, where he searches for specks of gold the old-fashioned way: with a pan, a shovel and a homemade sluice. His daily routines are documented with great tenderness in Alfredo Pourailly De La Plaza’s absorbing documentary, shot over nearly a decade. The camera often lingers on Toto’s wrinkled hands, as he carefully handles tiny flecks of the precious metal, or writes down his hopes and dreams in a neatly kept diary. Despite his contentment with this simple way of life, his body is etched with the physical toil of the demanding work. When Jorge, Toto’s worried son, decides to build a trommel from scratc...
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Kensuke’s Kingdom review – Michael Morpurgo’s desert island boy’s own adventure

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Morpurgo’s yarn about a kid on a round the world voyage is adapted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and attractively packaged as a family-friendly animation

Michael Morpurgo’s children’s story is a boy’s-own desert island adventure, closer in spirit to The Coral Island than Lord of the Flies, and here attractively presented as a family animated feature, adapted by the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce. The story itself makes clear that the action must be happening around the time of the original novel’s publication in 1999, and not really the present day.

Michael (voiced by Aaron MacGregor) is a moody, lonely boy on a round-the-world sailing trip with his family, but his immaturity and unreliability exasperate his older teen sister (Raffey Cassidy) and parents (Sally Hawkins and Cillian Murphy). Unbeknownst to any of them, Michael has smuggled his beloved dog Stella aboard and when their craft hits stormy seas, Michael and Stella get washed up on a remote island which he soon discovers is in fact the private kingdom of an elderly Japanese second world war veteran, Kensuke (Ken Watanabe) whose own story is a poignant and awe-inspiring contrast to Michael’s.

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