Darwin's Nightmare

Darwin’s Nightmare
By Hubert Sauper

As part of my ongoing efforts to keep my brain from atrophying from misuse, I’m trying to read more non-fiction and also watch more documentary films. This is another post about a film rather than a book. While I’m sure no one is interested in my thoughts on the newest Jennifer Aniston film, I do feel like I’d like to share some of the amazing films that I’ve discovered. Since we rarely get to see any advertisement for these films, I only hear about them through word of mouth. So, I’d like to make my contribution to the word of mouth about Darwin’s Nightmare.

This is a film about people and fish.

Darwin’s Nightmare is a documentary filmed in Tanzania on the shores of Lake Victoria, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Sometime in the 1960’s a new species of fish, the Nile Perch, was introduced into Lake Victoria. The Nile Perch is a natural predator and soon changed the ecology of the lake forever, virtually wiping out all the native fish species. However, the Nile Perch also developed into Tanzania’s largest industry and fish factories sprung up all along the shores of Lake Victoria. Today, Nile Perch is the country’s single biggest export and huge cargo plane-loads of fish are exported to Europe from Tanzania everyday.

Darwin’s Nightmare explores the environmental, economic and social impact of this one fish on the land and people of Tanzania. Tanzania is a country plagued by poverty, an epidemic of AIDS and civil war. The film explores the complex relationship between this fish, an exploitive fishing industry and the society of fisherman, prostitutes and orphans that have resulted.

Here’s what the filmmaker, Hubert Sauper, had to say about the project:

In DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish
and the ephemeral boom around this "fittest" animal into an ironic, frightening
allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of
movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas,
and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the
destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are
unable to "get it", unable to actually believe what we know.

It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into
servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me
feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa,
globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the
people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third
world (that's three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future
dangers for all peoples.

(from the official website: http://www.darwinsnightmare.com/)

This was a deeply disturbing and memorable film. Sauper is able to establish very intimate connections with his subjects, and his depiction of their lives is compelling and unforgettable. Sauper tells this story by interspersing different narratives and leaving the viewer to form his or her own conclusions about their interconnectedness.