Venice once shone with 300 workshops that made gold leaf by hand. Mario Berta Battiloro was the last. In 2025 it, too, closed for good. 

This documentary captures an age-old process, 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; captured at the threshold of disappearance.