• Producer(s):

    ARTE GEIE, TAGLICHT MEDIA

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2011

  • Language(s):

    German, French

  • Rights:

    NON-THEATRICAL, TV, VOD, DVD, INTERNET

When part of the Equatorial forest was drowned under litres of water to create an artificial lake in the 1960s, nobody could imagine that the submerged trees would later constitute a natural treasure.

In 1964, the Republic of Surinam, the former Dutch Guyana, a country with high levels of bauxite in its soil, invested in the production of aluminium. The closure of the dyke on the Afobaka dam flooded part of the forest - over 1,500 square kilometres of land and nearly 50% of the Saramaca tribe's land. This constituted a trauma for the 6,000 inhabitants of the flooded zone, who were displaced then rehoused in make-shift shelters, about a hundred kilometres away in Brownsweg.
But electricity is not the only resource produced by the artifical lake. The submerged tree trunks of the tropical forest consitute a veritable engulfed treasure - manna for the small republic.