Inspired by Mackenna’s Gold, a movie I watched when I was around eight. It was probably the first—and perhaps the only—Hollywood movie I remember my uncles talking about back in those days. For a film to travel all the way into our little world in Tuni says something about how enormous its reach must have been. What stayed with me wasn’t so much the story as the landscape: the hills, the river winding through them, and above all, gold at its most dazzling, shining nuggets hidden somewhere in that vast country. As a child, that landscape seemed almost mythical. Looking back at it now, Eldorado is less a drawing of a place than a drawing of that childhood idea of where gold might be hiding.
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