In Simon Panay’s The Boy with White Skin, an albino child is sent down into a gold mine in West Africa to sing so that the magical powers the miners believe he has will bring them good fortune.
Awards Buzz spoke with Panay about how his documentary work following real-life rituals like this led him to want to recreate it in a narrative short. He clarified that this isn’t something that would be seen as sacrilegious or offensive:
“We talked about it because we partially filmed in a real gold mine, in the Tenkoto gold mine in Senegal, which is a huge mine, and we talked about the authorities and the beliefs. To them, it was not an issue because of two things: it’s a narrative so it’s not sacred. It was not in real galleries. And I was not allowed to film not because it’s a ritual, it was just the fact that they were paying for the albino to sing and they didn’t want to take the risk to break the magic. It was more about that. So, with the gold miners, we talked about, it was not an issue at all if we made a narrative out of it. It’s a very strange world with a lot of mythology and a lot of legends. And if you don’t stay for a very long time, you do not understand and you just scratch the surface and then understand it in a very superficial way, because you will see hard labor and you will see misery and you will see this kind of stuff that really pops up to your mind when you first cross it. But it’s a very deep world and very hard to understand. So, when you do understand their beliefs, I think it’s much better to them if you try to say it in a deeper level.”
Watch the video above to hear about the challenges of filming in a mine and what Panay wants to explore next.
The Boy with White Skin is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Live Action Short.
