Watch the 2026 Amazon Film Grant documentary “Clean Gold”
Watch the 2026 Amazon Film Grant documentary “Clean Gold”
One World Media and Mongabay are proud to release Clean Gold, the short documentary produced by Peruvian filmmaker Felipe Esparza Pérez through the Amazon Film Grant.
Watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JkZOTB8TVs
About the film
In Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian Amazon, thousands of people depend on gold mining, while the spread of mercury and deforestation are transforming the country’s most biodiverse tropical forest. In La Pampa, one of the region’s main gold mining hubs, a formalized artisanal mining operation is trying to prove that another way of mining is possible.
Facing roadblocks, violence, informal economies, and government neglect, the operation seeks to produce “clean gold” using mercury-free technologies. Through the daily lives of workers, merchants, and small-scale miners, Clean Gold explores the tensions between survival, pollution, and legitimacy in one of the Amazon’s most complex extractive economies.
The film follows two miners and close friends: Lucila, a formal miner who rejects mercury and uses a gravimetric table to extract gold responsibly, and her friend Ángel, who still relies on mercury, by necessity rather than by choice. Their contrasting methods reveal the tension between ecological responsibility and economic survival that shapes artisanal mining across the region.
From the filmmaker
Felipe Esparza Pérez was selected as the winner of the Amazon Film Grant from over 50 applications across the Amazon region, receiving funding and support through the One World Media Fellowship to bring this story to the screen.
“By focusing on Lucila and Ángel, I wanted to present a more nuanced, human perspective that emphasizes resilience, contradiction, and the possibility of transformation,” says Felipe. “Artisanal miners in Madre de Dios are often portrayed only as destroyers of the forest, with little attention given to the intimate realities of their lives, the systemic corruption that sustains illegal economies, or the efforts of those who seek sustainable change.”
About the grant
The Amazon Film Grant is a partnership between One World Media and Mongabay, the independent media organization reporting on nature, created to support local storytellers documenting the urgent environmental and social challenges facing the Amazon.
Felipe Esparza Pérez is a Peruvian filmmaker whose work has screened internationally, including at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Biennale Videobrasil. His debut feature Cielo Abierto won the ILO Award for Decent Work at the Lima Film Festival in 2023.
Find out more about the Amazon Film Grant here.
This film was supported by the Amazon Film Grant, as part of the One World Media Fellowship.