PLOT: A documentary: The film shows how the introduction of the giant, predatory Nile perch into Lake Victoria in Tanzania devastates the local economy and pushes locals into starvation while feeding the people of Europe.
Darwin's Nightmare is an engaged, thinking person's dream.
Not that Austrian writer-director Hubert Sauper's documentary makes nice with the world. Instead, the film illustrates a rather grim reality about how creating an ecological disaster in a lake in Tanzania can feed the people of Europe and push local Africans into social chaos and starvation.
In other words, if you care and want to see how globalization can, in an extreme case, benefit the rich and kill the poor, watch this powerful film. The racist aspects of it are obvious.
Some viewers may remain in denial. But Sauper makes an impressive case by documenting how Russian jets fly in to pick up Nile perch fillets for export to Western Europe. Then we see Tanzanians reduced to picking over the maggot-infested heads, tails and carcasses for food while ammonia gas fumes burn their eyes. This garbage is comprised of the parts of the fish which are dumped after the tender white flesh has been sliced away. It's impossible to believe it is nutrious, appetizing or safe to eat. Stomachs churn.
Meanwhile, a second thematic line in the film shows how the Russian cargo planes are, according to Sauper and his sources in Europe and Africa, bringing weapons into Tanzania for resale to various African countries engaged in civil war. Arms in, fish out: Either way, Africans die.
The other frightening thing about it all is that the Nile perch is an introduced species, part of an experiment dating back to the 1960s in which an alien fish was dumped into the lake to see if a viable export fishery could be created.
That came to fruition. But at what cost? In the film, Sauper casually makes the case that the perch devastated the original local fishery, made Tanazanian fishers and farmers dependent on the export business, disrupted families and social order and ultimately led to misery. The post-colonial connection is made to drugs, prostitution, child abandonment, AIDS and a number of other social ills which arose from the collapse of a stable and structured environment.
But the Europeans are happy, the film demonstrates, as long as the quality and freshness of the Nile perch fillets is maintained. The cynicism involved in a filmed visit by a European delegation involved in the fishery is appalling.
Actually, almost everything you think about after seeing this film falls into the appalling category -- which is why it must be seen, debated and acted upon by thinking people. This process is at the very core of why documentaries exist.
(This film is rated PG)
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