Between Myth and Reality: Simon Panay on The Boy with White Skin

In his haunting new short film The Boy with White Skin (2024), French filmmaker Simon Panay continues his deep, almost anthropological exploration of Africa’s gold mining communities.

The 15-minute film sees an albino boy entrusted to a group of gold miners by his father. The boy’s presence and voice in the mine are believed to hold mystical powers that miners invoke in rituals meant to protect them as they risk their lives in pursuit of gold. It’s a work that hovers between stark realism and myth, inviting viewers into a world where superstition and survival blur into one.

The Boy with White Skin transcends the boundaries of cinema in a mesmerising exploration of humanity’s deepest fears and beliefs, where legend and truth intertwine. With remarkable vision and sensitivity, Simon Panay affirms his place among the most compelling filmmakers of his generation.

The short has already travelled far: more than 60 festival selections worldwide, including the France Télévisions Grand Prize at Clermont-Ferrand, the Breaking Boundaries Grand Prize at Rhode Island, Best European Short Film at Flickerfest, and Best Narrative Short (Oscar Qualifying) at Balinale.

When asked about this Oscar qualification, Panay allows himself a rare moment of reflection. “I’ve wanted to make films since I was ten,” he says, smiling. “Of course, I don’t do it for awards, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it isn’t a dream. For the whole team, it would mean everything.”

Much of Panay’s filmography is rooted entirely in Africa’s gold mines. “I felt like I’d only scratched the surface of this world,” he says, recalling his early work. His first short, the documentary Nobody Dies Here (2017), observed life in the illegal Perma Gold Mine, Benin, where men dig for months, hoping to strike it rich or die trying.

The shoot ended abruptly after just eight days when Panay was threatened with arrest by local authorities. The film nonetheless went on to win several awards, including Best Documentary and Best Human Rights Film at the Open Window International Film Challenge.

Rather than deter him, the experience deepened his fascination. His next project, the feature-length documentary If You Are a Man (2023), took over five years to complete, including two years of immersive research at Burkina Faso’s Perkoa Gold Mine. It followed a young boy working in the mines to pay his school fees. “It’s a very unknown place with its own rules and beliefs,” Panay explains. “What I witnessed while making If You Are a Man is much of what you also see in The Boy with White Skin.”

For Panay, these mines are ecosystems governed by mythology as much as by economics. “The miners treat gold as a beast; something to be hunted,” he says. “From that, they create their own hierarchy, as if they’re soldiers on a battlefield.”

Though Panay’s past films have been grounded in nonfiction realism, The Boy with White Skin signals his emergence into myth-touched fiction. Under emerging talent–focused production company Bandini Films’ meticulous guidance, the short takes on a lyrical, dream-suspended quality, with each frame sharpened with intention and each silence humming with mystery.

The boy’s descent from the glazed, forgiving light of the upper world into the black of the mine feels almost liturgical; an initiation, a quiet pilgrimage into shadow. What begins as a physical journey becomes something metaphysical; a shedding of innocence, a metaphor for stepping into the unknown depths of self and myth. The mine is not mere earth but a cathedral of darkness, and he enters it as both witness and sacrifice. The film unfolds like whispered poetry; otherworldly, reverent, and charged with a tension that pulses beneath its ethereal calm.

Reflecting on this, Panay stated that he chose to “cross the line into almost science fiction,” allowing it to inhabit a space between reality and legend. But he insists that fiction was the only way to tell this story truthfully. “If I had filmed it as a documentary,” he says, “I would have shattered the illusion and the beliefs that this entire culture thrives on.”

The miners’ faith in the boy’s voice becomes the spine of the film’s mythology. His singing, believed to keep them safe underground, turns him into both a talisman and a prisoner. “It’s their version of a canary in a coal mine,” Panay notes. “They listen to him for signs from the world beyond.” The result is a story that unfolds like a fever dream, rooted in authentic detail yet pulsing with something metaphysical.

Though The Boy with White Skin drifts toward the mythic, it never abandons the tactile truth of Panay’s documentary instincts. Visually, Panay carries his nonfiction discipline into a fictional world with striking restraint. The camera stays close, almost claustrophobically so, tracing the boy’s passage through tunnels and narrow shafts; we move as he moves and breathe where he breathes. “I wanted to make the audience feel as close to him as possible,” he explains. “The wide lens, the lack of cuts, creating a connection you can’t fake.”

Light becomes the film’s most expressive instrument. The opening arrives in the searing, indifferent glare of the desert; an upper world washed in a heat that feels both sacred and punishing. Then, like a plunge into mythic underworlds, we fall into true darkness. Underground, illumination is rationed to the faint flicker of headlamps; faces and gestures appear and vanish, existence reduced to slashes of light cutting through the void. “We agreed early that it had to be real darkness,” Panay notes. “You lose people for seconds at a time. But those flashes, when they land, give you the world. If the timing was off, the scene was gone.”

The effect is a hypnotic disorientation of part documentary immersion, part otherworldly descent. The mine becomes both a literal and symbolic space: a real tunnel carved by labour and history, yet also a cavern of myth, fear, and initiation. The boy’s journey may feel speculative, almost futuristic in its sparse ritualistic starkness, but the bodies, the breath, the dust remain unmistakably real.

Moreover, the film’s thematic undercurrent invokes deeper meaning alongside its artistic wonder. As well as Bandini Films, the short is produced by Astou Production in Senegal, an outfit known for championing African stories told with unvarnished honesty and cultural depth. This collaboration grounds the film in a lineage of narratives shaped not only by myth, but by history and lived experience.

Within the film’s quiet, reverent descent into darkness, echoes of real-world extraction reverberate. Panay draws inspiration from the global “blood diamond” economy and the shadowy laundering of African gold through networks in Dubai, where smuggled ore is melted down, reborn, and ushered into the world as pure and legitimate. The cycle, he suggests, is a familiar one—old colonial appetites wearing modern clothes, wealth again carved from the hands and soil of those left unseen. “It’s the same system of exploitation,” Panay notes. “Different material, same story.”

Yet Panay refuses the simplicity of moral assignment. His gaze remains observant, never prescriptive. “The film doesn’t push a message,” he says. “It’s not my job to judge, only to observe.” Still, the truth sits like ore beneath the surface. “The gold industry is a dirty one,” he admits. “There are links to terrorism, child labour, and money laundering. You can’t tell these stories honestly without acknowledging that.”

Whether or not the film brings home an Academy statuette, Panay has already succeeded in something rarer: giving shape and voice to a world few outsiders have ever seen, and fewer still have understood.

The Boy With White Skin does not yet have a UK release date. To find out more, visit the film’s website.