Battiloro

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.