Minerita
2013 · 26m · España
Directed by Raúl de la Fuente
The Cerro Rico de Potosí (Bolivia) is a territory without law, of brutal violence, where miners gamble their life in ramshackle galleries to extract silver and zinc; Minerita is the story of three women, Lucía (40), Ivone (16) and Abigail (17) who work as watchwomen or inside the mine and fight to survive in a hell not fit for life, with courage and dynamite as their only weapons.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the mining doc to be grim sociology—Minerita flips it by centering three women's agency and dark humor in a space designed to crush both, which is contrarian enough to actually matter.
De la Fuente's formal restraint—letting the mine's geometry and the women's silhouettes do the narrative work rather than explanatory voiceover—situates this firmly in the lineage of humanist documentary that trusts the frame.
The decision to shoot the women as protagonists rather than victims, and to hold on their faces during moments of mundane survival between the violence, is the single choice that transforms this from reportage into cinema.