Documentary
In the rich hill of Potosí in Bolivia there is a silver mine that was the largest in the world. It has been exploited since 1546 with the arrival of the Spanish who enslaved the indigenous people to steal the precious metal. To this day, hundreds of meters underground, the…
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His buildings are garish, colorful and completely overloaded. Columns and glittering chandeliers everywhere, and way too much of everything. The Bolivian civil engineer and architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971) builds houses in El Alto for a nouveau riche upper class of the Aymara, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Bolivia.
Danger, toil, and superstition pervade life in a mining town high up in the Bolivian mountains. Tin is the heartbeat of the community providing jobs and livelihoods - but at considerable cost. With deaths commonplace, people make offerings to El Tio, the devil under the earth, for protection and good fortune. But when the mountain's flow of tin ebbs, further measures must be taken...
In December of 2002, McDonald's had to shut down their restaurants in Bolivia. The company cited financial problems, but the real reasons were to be found elsewhere. Bolivia may be a small, poor nation on the global market, but a country's fierce local food culture can be sometimes a more powerful factor than economic clout. In his first feature-length documentary, Fernando Martinez shows what happened, a story driven by the characters behind the events and their life stories, such as renowned cooks and a review of popular sayings about the Bolivian food. The symbolism is obvious when a multinational giant is 'brought to its knees' by a country's traditions and heritage.
