Screen Scene: "Darwin's Nightmare"

“Darwin’s Nightmare” Directed by Hubert Sauper
International Film Circuit

The cobbler’s children go barefoot in Tanzania. The
seemingly harmless Nile perch fish is the largest source of income
for the towns surrounding Lake Victoria. The fisheries in these
towns supply the residents with calendars which serve as subtle
reminders: “You are part of a big system,” one of the
pages reads. This system ““ and the ways in which it has
proved disastrous for the population ““ is the subject of the
Academy Award-nominated documentary “Darwin’s
Nightmare,” to be screened Tuesday by Melnitz Movies. The
fish, not endemic to Lake Victoria, was introduced into the lake in
the 1960s and has since taken over the environment. Nile perch are
caught and cut up into filets, which are sent to Europe in planes
““ flown by foreigners ““ that come to Africa with
ammunition, which fuels civil unrest. The locals pick through
fields of discarded fish carcasses for their dinners, while the
product of their labor is eaten in countries far away. Orphans on
the street sniff glue melted down from plastic packages used for
the filets. Prostitutes work for the foreign pilots and fishermen,
spreading diseases such as HIV. Director Hubert Sauper clearly
displays the interconnectedness of all these neighbors. Though the
storytelling is a bit scattered, their disparate lives intertwine
throughout the film to develop a nauseatingly sad and cruelly
ironic snapshot ““ a people in a deep famine living next to
the biggest source of Nile perch fish in the world. The film points
out the fact that there seems to be no escape from the situation:
U.N. meetings commend the fisheries for being the biggest supplier
of Nile perch to Europe. Sauper has stated ““ correctly
““ that he could make the same kind of observation in Sierra
Leone, but with diamonds instead of perch; in Honduras with
bananas; and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola with crude oil. What is
most troubling about “Darwin’s Nightmare” is that
it reflects not just a specific situation, but a universal reality
of globalization.

“”mdash; Ana Heller