Baltic Cinema: Monikondee

About this event

This arresting new film – part documentary, part scripted – follows a boatman’s journey along the river that borders Suriname and French Guiana as it brings him face to face with the twin forces of the global market and climate change.

Monikondee follows boatman Boogie navigating the Maroni River, which forms the border between Suriname and French Guiana, to deliver essential cargo to remote Maroon and Indigenous communities. While these forest peoples grow their own food, they are increasingly dependent on boatmen for their daily provisions. Climate-driven flooding and droughts are destroying their crops, and gold mining is poisoning the water.

Tolin Alexander, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s superb new film dissects how capital corrupts everything and everyone it touches. If this story seems familiar, it is the combination of the particular place in which it unfolds here, alongside the particular people it affects, which not only adds persuasion to the argument against neoliberalism but folds in unexpected stories which are resonant beyond Boogie’s immediate environment — not least the power of institutions such as school to further weaken the structures which hold out against the logic of the market.

Despite the extreme contrast of environment between the rivers Maroni and Tyne, here is much the same fight: a workforce no longer unified, competition in place of cooperation, profit over people. But of course for Boogie and his community, the shadow of colonialism also hangs heavy, and it is interchangeable with the coming of capitalism. As he says, ‘the whites make the rules in money land’.

Monikondee, or ‘Money Land’ is at once a document of communities in flux, of a land in crisis, and a defence of the structures that grant people agency. However, it is no dry thesis: our time with Boogie in his boat as he navigates rapids and balances the need to make a living with that of appeasing the gods is as human as it comes.

Monikondee is currently without a UK distributor and screens here for the first time after its UK première at Open City Documentary Festival in April.