Parasisi

PARASISI is the Wayana word for intruder, outsider, parasite. It describes the gold miners who poison the river, the missionaries who repress indigenous identity, and doctors who arrive to monitor mercury levels by cutting locks of hair from pregnant women and their children, then leave again. It describes us.

We came to this film as fieldwork. Long before we shot a single image, we spent months reading anthropology and months in conversation with Jupta Itoewaki of the Mulokot Foundation, a Wayana woman who grew up on the Lawa River and now advocates internationally for the rights of Suriname's indigenous peoples. Her organisation works from one demanding principle, nothing about us without us. It was the condition of our access, and it became the condition of our filmmaking, following the methodological commitments of participatory ethnographic filmmaking rather than conventional documentary practice. That principle decided how we shot, observationally, without staging scenes or cutting them into shape, letting Wayana life set the terms of what the camera was allowed to see.

The choice to shoot in black and white came from a specific moment on our first research trip. We had been filming on the Lawa River, and when we looked at the footage in monochrome we saw what it had done to the water. It no longer looked like water. It looked like mercury, moving, luminous, menacing. The medium of the image had become the substance at the centre of the story.

There was a second reason. Our collective memory of indigenous peoples is built almost entirely from black-and-white photographs made by missionaries and explorers, sparse clothing, suspicious eyes, wooden canoes, people living in harmony with a nature that colonial imaging was describing and destroying at the same time. Filming a Wayana community in black and white invokes that history. We do it deliberately, to set the modernity of actual Wayana life inside that frame and let the collision do the work. The choice is a form of argument.

Every year, small-scale gold mining releases sixty thousand kilograms of mercury into the Surinamese environment. It is in the fish, the cassava, the rain and the air. Children are growing up with it in their blood. We made the film because stories told carefully and without sentimentality can change what people are willing to see, about gold, about indigenous sovereignty, about post-colonialism that has never actually ended, not in Suriname, not in French Guiana, or elsewhere in the world. If Parasisi proves useful to the Wayana in their fight for land rights and self-determination, it will have done what we needed it to do.