Darwin's Nightmare
I don't know how cool it is to recommend a movie 'round here but I saw this documentary Darwin's Nightmare at the Toronto Film Festival last year and I can't believe it got distribtution. It's opening in New York this week and it's a must see for anyone interested in Africa, globalization, the environment, the arms trade, AIDS etc. I thought there might be a few people here who fit that bill. If you can see it you should. This film will easily slip below the radar and disappear without a trace and it's too important.
It is one of the most depressing, harrowing documentaries I've ever seen. This film documents the beginning of the end. Below the fold is what I wrote about it after seeing it at Toronto:
d. Hubert Sauper
Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare is the kind of film that sends you out of the theater in a daze of horror, disillusion, impotence and disgust. About the best you can hope for is that you'll make it home and under the covers before your head clears and you remember it's a documentary.
Sauper's subject is the ecological disaster and human tragedy unfolding on and around the Tanzanian banks of Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world and the source of the Nile. Some time in the late 1960s, as part of a "little experiment," someone (apparently no one knows for sure) introduced a new species to the lake waters, the Nile Perch, a voracious carnivore that multiplied like crazy. The perch quickly became the region's only staple product when Europeans developed a taste for it. A fishing culture took root as small, outrigger style boats feed the processing plants on shore which in turn load the gaping Russian-operated cargo planes that carry the filets from one strip runways to European plates. Decades later, however, the perch has decimated the indigenous fish stocks and turned on its own young as a fresh food supply. This cannibalistic turn, combined with decreasing oxygen levels in the lake, heralds the end of the Nile Perch and the human community that depends it.
For Sauper the fate of the perch is also a chilling reflection of the lake's human community, the fisherman, pilots, factory owners, prostitutes, mercenaries and hustlers. It's a wasted pool of victims and vipers in which every desperate bid for survival only hastens an inevitable extinction. Meanwhile, the dwindling fruits of it all are sold in the markets and restaurants of Europe, a far away land, its citizens the only off-camera link the entire perverted food chain.
What's there, on screen, can at times be unbearable to watch, in part, because of the horrible efficiency with which the local economy operates. Once the perch are filleted for export their skeletal remains are discarded in wide muddy dumping grounds where the poorest of the poor gather them up in unspeakably unsanitary conditions for curing and re-sale. Standing barefoot in an ankle deep mush of mud, maggots and rotting fish, a woman with one eye tells Hauper, "My life is good. I have work."
Even the extra, discarded plastic wrap used to package the fish for export has a use: gangs of street urchins melt it down into a glue and huff it for a high that makes it easier to sleep on the sidewalk or in an alley.
On the macro level, Hauper runs down the answer to a question posed early on in the film's 107 minutes: If the Russian cargo planes leave full of fish, what do they bring when they arrive? At first, all Hauper can get anyone to say - pilots, local officials, factory owners - is that the planes come in empty. Eventually, however, the truth is revealed in one of the film's most poignant moments when a Russian navigator, on the edge of tears, confesses that the planes are part of lucrative trade supplying weapons to the regions bloody conflicts. The welling eyes of this gruff, hard Russian are as shocking as anything in the film as a quiet acknowledgement of the role he plays in the region's nightmare but that he, like the woman in the muddy fields, has no choice: it's a job.