Just 3 People Talking

Not many Black women own a pristine piece of the Amazon rainforest in our protracted age of gendered and racialized extraction. This filmic meditation introduces audiences to one such person, Aunty Joan, who in reality may not be just one person, and whose possession of this precious 357 acres of land is far from settled. Informed by Afro-Indigenous Guyanese Spiritualist—or Komfa—philosophies and practices, Joan is also Dolly, an ancestor spirit known to be bassidy, a Creolese word meaning something close to “beyond normality.” Joan, a journalist and novelist now in her eighties, has for decades struggled along with her guide Bassidy Dolly to secure legal right to occupy Yukuriba Heights, a once-self-sustainable organic farm and arts commune situated deep in the Amazonian Essequibo region of Guyana.