Darwin's Nightmare: See It

I saw the DVD of Hubert Sauper's 2004 documentary Darwin's Nightmare over the weekend and I highly recommend this movie to everyone. It's one of the most difficult things I've ever seen and probably one of the most essential. This YouTube viewer made the above complilation but you can see more scenes from the film here and here.

Sauper's style is at times quite brutal in it's unflinching directness and yet also poetic. There is no narrator and many things are left unexplained, but he captures the uneasy strangeness of Africa, a place where great beauty and great cruelty too often co-exist. The DVD extras feature a very good interview with the director who explains how globilization and social Darwinism are at the root of much of the evil the befalls the poor souls who are unlucky enough to be born poor and in Africa. Vanity Fair and a host of A-list celebrities are currently propelling "the dark continent" into the limelight but Sauper's films take us places than Annie Liebowitz never could. I could not believe the things I was seeing and will truly never be the same after watching Sauper's films.

Sauper's other award-winning documentary, Kisangani Diary(about Hutu refugees who have fled to Zaire), is one of the Darwin's Nightmare DVD extras and it is one of the most harrowing things that you will ever see. (One nightmare image from the film is above.) More proof that Hell really is here on earth. You won't want to watch this movie but we all should. Might put Paris Hilton's upcoming interview on Larry King in perspective.

From the Darwin's Nightmare wikipedia entry:

Darwin's Nightmare is a 2004 film written and directed by Hubert Sauper. It was nominated for Best Documentary Film at the 78th Academy Awards.

Through interviews with the Russian and Ukrainian plane crew, local factory owners, guards, prostitutes, fishermen and other villagers, the film discusses the effects of the introduction of the Nile Perch to Lake Victoria, how it has affected the ecosystem and economy of the region. The film also dwells at length on the dichotomy between the huge amount of European aid which is being funneled into Africa, and yet at the same time the flow of munitions and weapons from European arms dealers flows unendingly into the continent, often on the same planes which transport the Nile Perch filets to European consumers, feeding the very conflicts which the aid was sent to remedy. As Dima, the radio engineer of the plane crew, says later on in the film, "The children of Europe receive grapes for Christmas, the children of Angola receive guns". The appalling living and working conditions of the indigenous people, in which basic sanitation is completely absent and many children turn to drugs and prostitution, is covered in great depth; because the Nile Perch fish is farmed commercially, all the prime fillets are sold to European supermarkets, leaving the local people to survive on the festering carcasses of the gutted fish.