Beautifully sincere, Zaïde Bil and Sébastien Segers Parasisi perfectly choose their moments to hammer home the exploitation affecting the Wayana people. This documentary leaves its mark on you.
On the border of Surinam and French Guiana, the indigenous Wayana territory is overrun by intruders. Illegal gold miners poison the river, missionaries repress indigenous identity, and even doctors with the best intentions leave marks that are often silently violent. The Wayana call these intruders Parasisi.
Angela Otten’s sparse but gorgeous black and white cinematography poignantly highlights the different ways in which the indigenous Wayana are affected by the illegal activities of the gold miners. The lens is never in a hurry, often lingering longer than it has any right to, yet you can never stop watching as the topics raised are never truly spoken about. There are no talking head segments here. Parasisi is a documentary that visually addresses the issues at hand, and at times, that is the more powerful narrative choice.
Parasisi is full of powerful moments, one such being a doctor who is trying to treat his patients but bemoans that his old computer doesn’t work and that all of his notes and work must be filled out the old-fashioned way on paper. Not long later, we are presented with an interaction in one of the Chinese-run shops in the territory for the miners. A young worker there, bored out of her skull, is not only sitting, watching a video on a tablet, but also watching it on what looks like a top-notch iPad. It’s a brutal reality check to the situation these people are in.
Couple this with what that specific appointment is about: checking a young mother and her child for mercury poisoning due to the water, and thus the fish getting infected, causing mercury levels in the population to rise to, at times, 5 times the limit a human should be able to endure.
Other ways in which the daily life has been stripped from the culture are that we see multiple languages spoken in the documentary’s doctors’ offices, English and French. Even in a school where Dutch is taught to the children, we hear their native language only rarely. Once that realisation hits you, it rocks you far more than it should. The daily life for the people here is to survive or support the illegal trade that is happening, so they can earn money for their families. It’s a continual no-win situation.
Bil and Segers so methodically choose each moment like this. They are showing us step by step how humanity has come in and made the lives of this territory so much worse. Whether it is the text at the beginning of Parasisi that details the history of the Wayanas, or physically seeing how stunning landscapes have been butchered so machines and quad bikes can roam around to make a buck off land that isn’t theirs. You cannot help but hate what is happening, but much like the people getting tormented by their land disappearing, their numbers dwindling, and their culture vanishing, all we can do is sit and watch.
Parasisi is a reflective documentary that at times leaves you speechless, whether from the compellingly gorgeous visuals or from the way a group’s cultural identity can be deliberately eradicated over time.
★★★★
Parasisi is Premiered at Hot Docs 2026
