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DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE
year 2004 length 107' colour 35mm country Austria, France, Belgium
directed by Hubert Sauper
First Long Film
Screenplay Hubert Sauper
Cinematography Hubert Sauper
Editing Denise Vindevogel
Sound Veronika Hlavatsch
Producers Edouard Mauriat, Antonin Svoboda, Martin Grschlacht, Barbara Albert, Hubert Sauber
Production Mille et Une productions, Coop99, Saga Film
World Sales Celluloid Dreams
2, rue Turgot - 75009, Paris
Tel. +33 1 4970 0370 Fax + 33 1 4970 0371
www.celluloid-dreams.com
synopsis
Darwin's Nightmare is a tale about humans between the North and the South, about globalization, and about fish.
Some time in the 1960's, in the heart of Africa, a new fish was introduced artificially into Lake Victoria - as a small scientific experiment. The "Nile perch" extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the voracious predator multiplied so fast, that it's white fillets are today exported all around the world.
Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their cargo - Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted civil wars in the dark centre of the continent.
This booming multinational industry of food and weapons has created an odd and globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of young fishermen, Indian factory owners, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Russian pilots and Tanzanian prostitutes…
In Darwin’s Nightmare, what really strike the viewer are the people’s faces. Is it how Hubert Sauper films them? Is it how he chooses them? Or is it, more simply, what they are? The actors of a tragedy unfolding, whose ordinary gravity adds depth to every shot. There is the Russian pilot and his Tanzanian mistress who sings her love for her country in the most understated and yet dramatic way. Another Russian pilot would like to bring all children of Africa “presents, not guns”. A middle-aged Tanzanian man is happy to have a job, paid a dollar a day, guarding the entrance of a fishing laboratory, except he wouldn’t like to be killed like his predecessor… Lake Victoria breed fish for two million people yet the local community faces famine and AIDS wrecks almost every family in the area. A powerful report.
Agnès Catherine Poirier
link
Official Site
director's statement
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 observation in Sierra Leone, only the perch would be a diamond, in Nicaragua, a banana, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, the fish would be crude oil.
Most of us I guess, know about these dangerous mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to actually believe what we know. It is so incredibly systematic, that wherever prime material is discovered the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers and their daughters are turned into servants and whores.
It seems that the individual participants within this deadly system have no ugly faces, and for the most part, no bad intentions. These people include you and me. Some of us are “only doing their job” (like flying a jumbo from A to B carrying napalm), some don’t want to know, others simply fight for survival. I tried to film the personalities in this documentary as intimately as possible. Sergey, Diamond, Raphael, Eliza, real people who wonderfully represent the complexity of this system and for me, they are the real enigma.
Hubert Sauper
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