Down on the banks of the Maroni River, little Derreck dreams of heroic warriors. He’s a member of the Wayana tribe in French Guyana. In this film, Derreck is not our only portal into another world. His sister Sylvana also dreams – of an impossible love, who belongs to a different tribe.
Their grandmother Malilou takes us back to her youth in the 1950s. It seems that everyone wanders off now and again into a parallel, at times almost ghostly world. Whereas the youngest members of the tribe can still lose themselves in boundless flights of fantasy, the older generation contemplates more existential questions.
How do dreams of the future relate to identity? What makes you a real Wayana? This magical realist glimpse of the life of this native tribe in the Amazon balances on the edge of fiction, showing how change is inevitable even in this remote village. In Wayana, Anuktatop means metamorphosis. (IDFA)
