In 2014, the Dutch filmmaking duo of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan made a film called Episode of the Sea, collaborating with the residents of Urk, a Dutch fishing island. The island’s inhabitants reenacted their lives for the camera in stark, Straubian tableaux, lending their traditional practices a formal rigor and an eerie timelessness. Monikondee, the pair’s new film (co-directed by Tolin Alexander), is by no means as radical as Episode of the Sea, but then it has a very different job to do. Set in Suriname, Monikondee (“money land”) observes the social and economic interactions of the Fiiman people, forest tribes previously called “Maroons.” These communities were founded in the 18th century by escaped enslaved people, and they organized themselves into several ethnic and linguistic groups: the Pamaka, Aluku, and Ndyuka are the ones featured in the film, along with two Indigenous Surinamese peoples, the Kalina and the Wayana.
Monikondee may remind some film festival viewers of an earlier film, Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May, from 2009. Like that film, Monikondee uses Steadicam shots to follow various Fiiman workers as they move between their interior villages and the industrial/commercial areas that surround them. Both films also zero in on the gold mining (mostly controlled by Brazilian interests) that has disrupted the Fiimans’ cooperative economy, alongside contributing to the destruction of rainforests and the polluting of Suriname’s major rivers. But where Russell’s film, organized as a series of long sequence-shots, seemed more interested in simply existing alongside its subjects, Monikondee goes out of its way to draw concrete connections between the various people we see. If the earlier film was more about portraiture, Monikondee is about 21st-century networks that connect tradition, modernity, and hypercapital into a syncretic form of privation.
If there is a main character in Monikondee, it is “Boogie,” a boatman who specializes in transporting goods between the port and the interior villages. While he carries all manner of merchandise in his long wooden craft, most of his deliveries consist of oil in large metal drums. Everyone needs fuel, and so Boogie is a busy man. We see him navigate the Maroni River, along the border between Suriname and French Guiana, and in the course of his travels, we learn about the legal disparity between these two historically interconnected populations. Boogie’s wife is from Guiana, where he can visit but not stay. The Guianese receive social benefits from the French government, whereas the former Dutch colony of Suriname gets no recompense from the Netherlands.
In some ways, Monikondee resembles a Jean Rouch film. As van Brummelen, de Haan, and Alexander move across the region, following various individuals going about their lives, we hear narration in which they explain the nature of their traditions and how “the whites” have corrupted them by introducing a monetary economy. And this is the primary takeaway from Monikondee. The abstraction of money induces selfishness, competition, and a fiduciary incentive to abandon centuries-old cultural practices. What had been a largely communitarian society based on mutual support is quickly growing unsustainable, as the younger generation joins the hustle, working in the mines or selling goods in corner stores. Near the end of Monikondee, the filmmakers show us a map of the Maroni River basin, tracing the movement of people and products. Capitalism keeps people connected, but alters the essential terms of human exchange. This is perhaps best exemplified by a scene in which Boogie delivers water and vegetables to a village, and the women receiving him complain that the vegetables are wilted and there is not all the water they requested. We have watched the boatman risk life and limb to navigate upriver, only to be bitched out like a downtrodden Amazon driver. Cyndi Lauper was right: money changes everything.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2025.
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