Boubacar Sangaré's film deftly manages to sit at the intersection of the universal and the particular, following the ordinary yet exceptional daily life of Rasmané, a 16-year-old boy making a living in a mining town in Southern Burkina Faso. While his work and that of his companions, many only slightly older than him, is exhausting and risky, performed with rudimentary tools and without any protective equipment, when Rasmané returns from the mine, he turns out to be a teenager like any other, afflicted by contradictory impulses, oscillating between childish naivety and a burning need to put on and flaunt the adult identity he is in the process of creating. All around him, the entire collective seems torn by similar contradictions, between preserving tradition and the lure of modernity, between wounded dignity and the absurd hope of enrichment, between fatalism and the promise of a future that is gold-plated, both literally and figuratively. Despite the rich imagery that surrounds the act and business of mining - first a symbol of industrialization, then of de-industrialization - and a certain crystalized idea of adolescence that Rasmané incarnates, Sangaré's protagonist remains opaque throughout the film, constantly reminding us that we cannot share his fate through a mere empathic transposition. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)