The Night Readers

Barely five years after gaining independence, the former Dutch colony of Suriname, saw Colonel Desi Bouterse seize power in a military coup. Drawing on the archives of the French public broadcaster RFO Guyane, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc revisits the Interior War which from 1986 to 1992 opposed the dictator and his former bodyguard Ronnie Brunswijk, who founded the Jungle Commando. The film recounts the clashes along the Maroni River, the material and human devastation suffered by the civil population, and the partial representation of the conflict shown on the French television channel: neighbouring French Guiana did its best to negotiate before reluctantly agreeing to welcome thousands of refugees. What is striking are some of the “embedded” reports filmed on Brunswijk’s motorboat, and others that question Colonel Bouterse with aplomb. As the film unfolds, we see the sworn enemies – president and guerilla – ultimately meeting each other behind the back of governments – silent enigmatic images that interrupt the chronological continuity of the editing. Secret talks, shifts from one camp to the other… It is this protean political landscape of post-colonial Suriname that the filmmaker questions – what the academic Eyal Weizman, who inspired the filmmaker, calls “the humanitarian present”: “Within this present condition, all political oppositions are replaced by the elasticity of degrees, negotiations, proportions and balances.” (1) (C.G.)

(1) Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils. Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, Verso, 2011.