October 2005 | Film Review
Darwin’s Nightmare
Why you need to know where your food comes from...
by Andrea Blum
Austrian filmmaker, Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare opens with a gritty shadow of a Russian plane flying over Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest lake and source of the Nile. In the 1950’s and 60’s, British colonial authorities introduced an exotic species to what had been one of the Earth’s most ecologically diverse bodies of water. Today Lake Victoria is a textbook example of an ecological experiment gone terribly wrong. The Nile Perch, a giant fish that can weigh over 300 pounds, has fattened up on most of the species in the lake and, apparently, has resorted to eating its young. Less than one percent of native species still survives.
But more alarming is the parallel human storyline on land — a Darwinian tale of survival in the shadow of exploitation of dwindling resources. A multi-million dollar business run by foreign multinationals has grown out of the global market for fresh perch fillets. It is Tanzania’s largest export to the European Union; each day, 500 tons of fish are flown out on behemoth cargo planes, and they return with arms supplying the warlords around the continent.
On the banks of the lake, ragged fisherman struggle to survive amidst famine and disease. Although the people can’t afford to eat the fillets, they are dependent upon its commerce for survival. While millions of European consumers unwittingly eat their fish dinners, the people of this lakeside town are left with only the carcasses. The film cuts to a harrowing scene of a truck loaded with fish heads and skeletons hauled off to maggot-filled drying racks stacked by old women blinded by the ammonia off-gases. The carcasses are fried in earthen pits and then sold to the local population.
It is not an unusual story for Africa; instead of oil or diamonds, it’s fish. The resources are exploited and so, in the end, are the people. But Sauper gives the desperation a human face — a very intimate one. We get to know the characters inside their opaque lives. We may feel for them, but we can do nothing to help them. Like the pilots who fly off with their cargo, when the film ends, we are just visitors.
Sauper’s hand-held camera shines on the Africa we hear about but never see. We learn how the big fish, with the collusion of the World Bank and IMF, crush the little fry. Sauper’s locus is the Tanzanian village of Mwanza, a world broken by greed. In 1997, Sauper landed at its remote airstrip on a UN aid plane while working on another film, Kisangani Diaries. Perplexed by the voluminous air traffic there, he asked “Why?” As Sauper recorded Tanzania’s fishy trade, a cinematic Leviathan emerged, an allegory of corrupt globalism.
By the end of the film, we know the pilots’ names and the whores they beat. Eliza, a prostitute, with full lips and an angelic voice, speaks through candlelight about her desire for education, her lost family and her dreams. We meet homeless children with bloated bellies who fight like monkeys for their daily meal. They boil fish-packing material to make glue they can sniff. One of them, Jonathan, becomes an artist and draws street scenes of desperation. He leads us through the dark streets as if they were the byways of a crooked funhouse in an amusement park. We meet Lisa, a girl who sleeps in the street surrounded by young boys for protection from the older ones who abuse her. We see villagers ravaged by AIDS and a woman who is led to a hut and tells us she hasn’t the strength to eat — her husband died of AIDS and now her children are alone. And there is Rafael, a night watchman with glowing teeth and armed with poison arrows, who guards a government fishery building for a dollar a night. The previous guard had been murdered.
As in Sebastian Salgado’s photography, Sauper reveals a lost and desperate landscape, one he renders with poetic dignity. The film inspires, even when it is hard to watch.
Saupers says his intention was “not just to witness reality but to have a point of view of places and people…. I only need to close the gap from knowledge to awareness. That’s the work. That’s the art of cinema.”
Darwin’s Nightmare opens Fri., October 14 at Balboa in San Francisco and Mon., October 17 at the Rafael Film Center.
Andrea Blum is a regular contributor to Common Ground magazine.
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