On-board camera, as if pulled along by her characters, Ico Costa creates a melodramatic fiction in close collaboration with the locals, capturing their realities as closely as possible while working on typical situations. “The simpler the stories, the truer they are“, said Fassbinder. Domingo and Neusia play themselves. They are young and in love. He works in a car wash but his boss does not pay him. She is pregnant. He decides to go to the other side of Mozambique to work in the gold mines to support his future family. Ico Costa embarks on a sensual and patient rewriting of reality, dissecting the heart of an exploitative system based on gold panning and the resulting way of life. Very concrete, O ouro e o mundo exposes a social status: the heavy bags of dirt carried under a blazing sun, the barefoot walks on muddy paths, the labour and the waiting, the men on one side gathered around the same plate, the women on the other, their eyes turned towards the future, with the pending hope of the return of those who are far away. While the general economy of the film plays with the visual mechanics of the documentary, oscillating between crudity and coyness to blur the lines – the use of fiction makes it possible to set up head-on scenes that dig deeper into the violence and brutality with which the characters are confronted: such is the case with the tragic death of a comrade crushed in the mines. But the dense and precious raw material of the film remains the improvised or rewritten conversations. They unravel the dreams, motivations and disillusions of these men and women who clearly see the circulation of their desires subject to the gold that has become more precious to others than their lives.