Jason Fox: Monikondee is the second film that the three of you made together in Suriname. How did your previous films lead to this collaboration? Lonnie van Brummelen: When Dutch politics shifted drastically to the right around 2011, Siebren and I decided to make a film in Urk, a Dutch fishing village with a strong far-right populist presence. In this context, we opted to experiment with a participatory approach. We interviewed fishermen and used excerpts of verbatim transcripts to create the dialogue for a film script. These interviews were then re-enacted on camera by the fishermen themselves along [...]

AG: There’s a personal narrative at the center of the film in the story of Merah Muda, a political exile who flees Jakarta in the 1960s to live in The Netherlands. The story is intimate — a kind of counter-narrative perhaps — that also allows for the possibility of moving across different times, spaces and positionalities. ST: Yes. Merah Muda is a woman who is looking for a new home and a new place. Ria (her granddaughter) is looking to understand better her identity in the present. This again is another way to talk about belonging and [...]

Astrid Korporaal: What is the importance of exploring an intergenerational dynamic for you? It is a key element in this film, but also in some of your previous works. Hala Elkoussy: On a personal level, it comes from the fact that I have a growing child who's now approaching the age of the actor in this film, but I've always had a young voice in the work, carrying a torch for the future. It's not like I'm looking back at my younger self: I'm rediscovering what it is like to be young, through his eyes. In general, I [...]

What was the starting point for the film? Was it a particular place or question? In my last film, Aasivissuit (2019), I became interested in the rock dust that flows out of the glaciers in Greenland. I learned that Greenlandic rock dust can be used as nutrient to improve poor soil, because it contains minerals and can help capture CO2 in the soil. But then I saw a news item on Dutch TV showing that a large amount of rock dust had been dumped in a lake in the Netherlands, which was causing environmental damage. It triggered my [...]

In 2019, Jasper Coppes produced Aasivissuit together with VRIZA’s Lonnie van Brummelen, Uilu Stories’ Aka Hansen, and a crew in Greenland and the Netherlands. The film follows two park rangers at work and on expeditions through the sunlit grasslands of West Greenland. As they talk, they exchange new and old knowledge of the land, for example, how ancient fertile sediment from Greenland is used to fertilize depleted soil abroad, and how microbes have adapted to deal with pollution. In the meantime, the landscape and its inhabitants perform their acts. Kerstin Winking: Unlike most documentaries, Aasivissuit has no voice-over. [...]