It’s easy to scratch the surface of gold – in its pure form, it’s a very soft metal – and at times it feels as though the documentary The Shadow of Gold does merely that. Wide-ranging but less than 80 minutes long, the film touches on the American gold rush of the 19th century (and its own long shadow), the environmental destruction wreaked by mines as far apart as Canada and China, and the difficulty of trading in cruelty-free gold; unlike blood diamonds, “blood gold” can be mixed and melted until it’s indistinguishable. Co-directors Denis Delestrac, Robert Lang and Sally Blake criss-cross the planet to shed light on the shiny substance. But a thirtyfold increase in the price of gold since the early 1970s has set off a hunt for more of it. One thing for certain is that humanity’s appetite for the metal is not going away.

Source: National Post February 22, 2019 17:03 UTC