East Sussex screenings for film charting lost piece of colonial history

It comes from acclaimed writer and film-maker St Leonards-based Iain Sinclair and is directed by documentary film-maker Grant Gee who is based in Brighton. After its London premiere, The Gold Machine plays The Depot, Lewes on September 2 (Grant Gee Q&A); the Electric Palace, Hastings on September 3 (Iain Sinclair and Grant Gee Q&A); the Kino Teatr, St Leonards on September 4 (Iain Sinclair and Grant Gee Q&A) and Duke's at Komedia, Brighton on September 5 (Grant G ee Q&A).

The film will be available on the Mubi streaming platform for a year from September 1.

In the piece, a father and daughter are haunted by the legacy of their ancestor – a Victorian botanist sent to the Peruvian jungle to scout for coffee growing land. Retracing the ancestor’s colonial adventure, the film reveals the brutal reality of a major land grab from the native Asheninka people who try to wrest their land and story back.

Grant explains: “I have been a fan of Iain’s work for 30 odd years since his first novel and our paths have crossed numerous times over the years. We had a mutual friend who's a great fixer of projects and when Iain started talking about writing this book, the friend said we should make a film out of it. The story for Iain had become not quite an obsession but absolutely something he was fascinated by, based on the work of his great grandfather who was a botanist. How botanists worked in those days was working for the government and being sent off to various places to check the soil conditions.

“The British government had been given half a million acres of Peru to pay a Peruvian government debt, and Iain's great-grandfather was dispatched to scout this parcel of land and see what could be done. After his expedition he came back and said there was this new-fangled craze for coffee and that this parcel of land would be ideal. They set up a very big coffee colony, and the local people were roped in in semi-slavery. It was never successful. It was too isolated and the railways never got there.”

And so Iain and Grant embarked on book and film respectively, travelling out there in 2019: “Part of the reason I've always had such a sympathy with Iain's work is that he likes to work from the ground upwards. As he walks he takes notes and photos and he writes later, and I have always operated on that principle too. When he decided he was going to write about this episode, he decided he was going to go in his great-grandfather's footsteps along with his daughter and I said we could make the film together.

“We did the trip in 2019 and we had always planned to go back for the second shoot in 2020 but that was just not possible. Peru was one of the countries worst affected by Covid in the whole world so we just didn't get back.

"I knew that Iain’s book was going to come out and I wanted the film and the book to be at more or less the same point so I had to rejig what I was planning with the film but the thing that was really great was that I don't think I've ever filmed as intensely as I had on that first trip – so intensely obviously without knowing what the future was going to bring. It meant that I almost had enough material for the film.”