A participatory documentary along the Maroni River between Suriname and French Guiana. Boogie, a Maroon boatman, transports fuel and supplies to Maroon and indigenous communities in an 18-meter canoe. Each village becomes a stage transmitting fables, songs, and "Mato" stories, revealing cultural erosion and resilience. They face threats including gold mining, floods, and corporate intrusions. Boogie's transformation between community duties and logistics role symbolizes tensions between tradition and economy. The film explores colonial legacy, environmental crisis, and sovereignty through observational filming.

In Money Land, Dutch visual artists Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan join forces with Surinamese theater director Tolin Alexander to create a hybrid documentary that stays true to the tradition of participatory ethnographic film. Its central subjects—and collaborators—are the Maroon communities living along the river at Suriname’s borderlands. Descendants of enslaved people who escaped Dutch colonial plantations, they now face a homeland rapidly degraded by climate change, gold mining, and the encroaching tide of capital.

Drawing inspiration from mato, a local oral tradition of collective storytelling, the three co-directors developed a script in conversation with Maroon community members, reflecting their lived realities. The community itself chose and recommended the actors to perform it. This process of participation and exchange adds multiple layers to the film’s narrative, ensuring that the voices of a community confronting the destruction of its environment and traditions remain at the center. Observational scenes following a boatman ferrying between villages further ground the story, offering crucial insight into the challenges the Maroons face.

While money mediates relationships between people and goods, facilitating exchange, it simultaneously weakens all connections that it does not mediate. Without recognizing this, colonialism will return in a different guise. This is why the final scene—Maroon community members gathered to watch and discuss the film they helped create—matters most of all.

The film blends an immersive, sensory style with a collaborative, multi-voiced approach. It incorporates methods from participatory cinema and the mato storytelling tradition of the Maroons, where spectators interrupt the narrator with new storylines and songs. These approaches are realized in the film through multi-voiced storytelling, people re-enacting their own lives, and actors becoming spectators who reflect on the story they co-created.

• ProducerLonnie VAN BRUMMELEN
• Cinematography Sander COUMOU, Siebren DE HAAN
• Edit Bobbie ROELOFS, Lonnie VAN BRUMMELEN
• Sound Jaim SAHULEKA
• Cast Boogie ADIJONTOE