Rosia Montana, Town on the brink

Rosia Montana has been thrown into a state of disarray ever since the arrival of a Romanian gold mining corporation backed by powerful Canadian shareholders. The corporation is planning on razing a large portion of the town and its surroundings to the ground in order to access to a rock which happens to hold the largest gold deposits in Europe. The mining process involves the use of highly toxic cyanide to extract the gold from the rock – arguably a necessary risk to spur economic development in the area, though potentially fatal for the local environment and the beautiful landscape. More than 2000 people are poised to lose their homes. Many of them have chosen resettlement in big cities, but a small group of inhabitants is battling against the Company and defending their homes with all they have. A long-standing fight of the people in a deeply separated village where the division between opponents and supporters of the mining project even splits families down the middle.