25th Nov 1975: Suriname became independent from The Netherlands. The colonial age was over.

Incredible, time moves on relentlessly with no quarter like a train drilling into the night. Been nearly 2 months since I updated this journal. What happened since then? More business, more routines, more travels. Mid Sept Zagreb in Croatia to meet friends and look into the option of shooting a thriller there, great locations, great hospitality, checked out the set of a TV series, very pro, sets build in a nature reservation. Then back to London. End Sept Amsterdam, October in Suriname in the middle of a Caribbean Shipping Association conference, seminars, training, corporate film work, writing, more sword for hire work to draft business plans for clients. No jungle trips this time, hardly had time to meet friends, hardly time to even reply emails.

Nov back to Amsterdam, no culture shock this time upon my return in Europe, since the bulk of my time in South America was spent in airco conference rooms and offices or stuck in traffic. Birthday steak dining. Then back to London again to get all in shipshape. Slate of 5 low budget films (action-thrillers) planned with my business partners, complicated financial structures in place to raise funds for the features.

Now I understand why they call it development hell. I love cinema as a medium, but as Alan Moore puts it, the industry like most industries is just cumbersome, slow and has almost nothing to do with true artistic quality.

I’ve been updated by the producers who pitched my work that the broadcasters and companies liked the docu ideas, but thought they might be too intelligent. They’re looking more for “reality” TV. Interesting conclusion 1: As technology advances, mediocrity increases. Conclusion 2: Even the word “Reality” is now perverted, false, stripped of any last impartial meaning it once had.

The docu about gold mining in Suriname would feature a lot of aspects and is basically a story about survival, pollution and the idea of what’s really valuable. The consultant on it told me about guerillas in one of the islands around Papous New Guinnea and that they drove jeeps on coconut oil. This kind of jungle engineering feats were a chapter in the elaborate 3 part TV film I wrote. It might still happen, but with thousands of staff being made redundant in TV and film in this crisis it’ll be hard to get funding. And my focus is more on the fiction anyway.

Then this week a friend sends me a link of a streamed docu and it turns out to be about the guerillas I was given as reference. Amazing stuff, it puts the standard of basic infra-structure such as running tap water and heating in a different perspective.

Watch it, stand in awe of some seriously ingenious survival mechanisms at work. Compared to these people, Rambo is a pussy. MacGuyver, watch and learn:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1192286025577999101#docid=9176912815153879473

• Tweet