Synopsis


“Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. The plane will leave Mwanza for Europe carrying 55 tons of processed fish that has been caught by Lake Victoria fisherman and filleted at a local factory. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide, he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa? The answers vary. In any case, they leave behind a scene of misery and devastation that DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE presents as the agonized human face of globalization. While the flesh of millions of Nile perch is stripped, cleaned and flash-frozen for export to wealthy countries, millions of people in the Tanzanian interior live on the brink of famine. Filming with a skeletal crew, Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.” — A. O. Scott, The New York Times



DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE, a clear-eyed examination of the underbelly of globalization, screened at this year’s New Directors/New Films Festival and was named Best Documentary at SilverDocs and the European Film Awards.

Feeling more like sci-fi/horror than documentary, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE is the stranger-than-fiction tale of two relentless killing machines: the Nile Perch which, over the course of a few decades, ate through everything that used to live in Tanzania's Lake Victoria; and the foreign capitalists who introduced that non-native fish in order to sell it to European consumers. Losing out to both of these were the local Tanzanians who once lived off the lake's bounty, and now, literally, are left with bones and rotting carcasses. When things take an even stranger turn, thanks to an astounding third-act revelation, the relentlessness becomes a cautionary tale it may not be too late to heed.



Director Hubert Sauper has been making award-winning documentaries for the last twelve years. Born in Austria, he now lives and teaches in Paris. “The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world, seems to have been answered,” he observes. “The ultimate forms for future societies are ‘consumer democracies,’ which are seen as ‘civilized’ and ‘good.’ In a Darwinian sense the ‘good system’ won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them. 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.”