Ben Russell. Good Luck, 2017, (FR/GER, 143mins, Serbian and Samaraccan with English subtitles)

Beginning with a 600m descent into the depths of the earth, Good Luck shines a light on the human face of labour in an underground state-owned copper mine in Serbia. The hiss of oxygen cuts through the diesel rumble; the walls of the office vibrate with explosions two levels below; the miners’ physical struggle finds its mirror a continent away in the tropical heat of an illegal Surinamese gold mine. The water pumps roar under the blinding sun; silver liquid rolls across the hand of a Saramaccan Maroon as he adds mercury to dirt in a never-ending search for gold.

'From the outset, it felt too easy to critique a process that all of us are directly implicated in, to have a public opinion about the horrors and environmental destruction that are part and parcel of the mining process – be it legal or illegal. It ultimately wasn’t the process that interested me as much as the side effects of the process: the community that arises out of harsh conditions, the collective that manifests out of necessity. I spent months in these mines simply because I wanted to better understand how men persevere.' —Ben Russell

Ben Russell (b.1976, United States) is an artist, filmmaker and curator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based enquiry into trance phenomena and evoking the research of Jean Rouch, Maya Deren and Michael Snow, among others. He currently resides in Los Angeles.