Nous, de ce pays bouleversé

From Cayenne to Kuru, passing though Saint-Laurent up to Apatu commune, on the other side of the Maroni river, the film explores present-day French Guiana in the steps of a journey undertaken by the Guianese poet, Léon-Gontran Damas, in 1938. Powerful extracts from his striking book, Retour de Guyane, are mixed with the filmmaker’s personal notes and observations. The result is a return to the major upheavals that starkly reveal the social and economic unease that has existed for many years: the national education crisis that led to the 1996 and 1998 revolts, the creation of the Kuru Space Centre that has been a source of hope and disappointment, the forgotten Surinam war, which drove refugee populations into the west of the county and upset the region’s demographic balance. Nonetheless, the impression left by the journey through this mosaic-like country is one of a paradoxical unity’everyone feels Guianese in their own way.