


Battiloro. The last goldbeater of Venice, is a documentary about the last family in Venice, a city that once shone with 300 goldbeaters, who still make gold leaf by hand: Mario Berta Battiloro. Soon this workshop too will close permanently.
This documentary captures an age-old proces, revealing the poetry of the mundane - the labour, the repetition, the rhythm - and the metamorphosis of a hard and inanimate chunk of metal into something as soft as velvet, so thin it undulates like water.
Through intimate cinematography, a-rhythmic editing interrupting repetitive footage and a minimal-music composition that reimagines the auditory aspects of the process, the viewer is transfixed as the material is being transformed.
Battiloro. The last goldbeater of Venice, is a tribute to a slow craft in a fast-paced world; enduring on the threshold of disappearance.








CREDITS
Featuring: Marino Menegazzo, Sabrina Berta and Sara Menegazzo
Directed by: Eos Brüggen
Cinematography: Jesse Kroon
Production: Machtelt Brüggen Israëls
Edit: Arnaud Bellemans
Composition: Timon Persoon
Sound design & re-recording mixer: Sam Titshof
Original music: Vorrei spiegarvi, o Dio, K.418 (Mozart). The Orchestra Of The Eighteenth Century, with Cyndia Sieden, conducted by Frans Brüggen
With special thanks to: Thom Schrama, Zephyr Brüggen, Anne-Frans de Vink, Joost Kroon and Kate Rockett


