End of the Rainbow (ATOM Study Guide)

End of the Rainbow explores the impact of large-scale industrial gold mining on local communities in a remote region of Guinea, West Africa. The film looks at what happens when a massive international enterprise arrives in an area in which gold is already a significant element of the local economic system. Alluvial miners traditionally work in close family and kinship groups, and according to the rhythms of the day and the seasons. The Company's mine, however, is driven by the urgency of global capital and brings its own set of rules and norms of behaviour. The white foreigners who manage the mine understand little about the region they are operating in, other than where to find the gold. The mine functions as though it were outside of nature, operating to its own clock and calendar.

Early in the film we are given extended shots of the huge machinery rumbling slowly through the dusty dirt roads. It looks like the invading tanks of a hostile army, casually ripping out trees along the way with hardly a backward glance or any sense of concern for the damage being done. The point is made with subtlety, understatement and a kind of dry, laconic wit. The coming of the mine means noise and dust and carelessly toppled trees; but also excitement about possible escape from grinding, desperate poverty and unemployment.

End of the Rainbow eschews voice-over narration and explanatory captions, respecting the intelligence of its audience to negotiate the material in all its complexity, without being told explicitly and precisely what to think. This serves to abstract the specifics of the situation, so that the themes of the film become somehow bigger and deeper: this is not about one particular mining company, but The Company; this nameless black man sings the pain of his ancestors and all that they have endured through history; this white man the bearer of values from another world which place black people and less developed nations as obstacles in the first world's quest for wealth …

End of the Rainbow is an elegiac portrait of a world that is changing forever and of the people who are grappling to respond to those changes. It is also a moving testament to the universal human desire for a better life.