The Price of Sugar

Eighteenth-century Suriname. Lynda is the daughter of a white plantation owner; Mini-Mini is her slave. They share a father, which makes them half-sisters. Lynda turns steadily more bitter under the hard life of the colony, while an unexpected opening appears for Mini-Mini. Taking it would come at the direct expense of the woman who owns her and is also her sister. Jean van de Velde adapted the novel by Cynthia McLeod, for years the best selling book in Suriname. It shows slavery on the sugar plantations without decoration: people running, auctions, punishments, all of it on screen. It is one of the few large Dutch productions to look straight at the country's colonial past, and unquestionably the most uncomfortable of them.