Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) – PopMatters Film Review )

Slowly making its way across the U.S., Hupert Sauper’s remarkable documentary makes a series of arguments, subtle, clear, and irate, all hinging on imbalances of power. Or, less abstractly, all hinging on the Nile perch. Introduced into Tanzania’s Lake Victoria during the ’60s, the fish has had horrific effects on local economies — ecological, social, and financial — especially in the Mwanza region.

The Nile perch first appears in Darwin’s Nightmare as if by accident. A few carts pass by the camera, full of the garishly gigantic fish through the streets, en route to the factory where they’ll be prepared for shipping to Europe, as white fillets. Abroad, the Nile perch is considered a delicacy, which means it’s too expensive to be purchased or consumed by the folks who harvest it. In fact, the locals eat only the scraps left over from factory preparation, frying up fish heads and other detritus that lie in dirt and maggots before they are laid out on racks to dry in the sun.

In a word, the fish has created catastrophe. The experiment that introduced the perch into the lake during the ’60s (“One man, one lake, one afternoon,” muses one observer) led to its flourishing at the expense of everything else. As the perch went on quickly to consume all other fish in the lake — and now, they’re eating their own young, so voracious is their appetite — related food and social systems disintegrate as the economy spikes for a chosen few.

Two million people are starving in Tanzania. The film shows scrawny kids sniffing melted plastic to achieve some blessed unconsciousness, a mother so frail from AIDS that she has trouble speaking, men without limbs, and children with bloated tummies, their eyes wide with misery. Brief, heartbreaking interviews with some victims of the perch fallout include a security guard Eliza, a prostitute introduced as “the girlfriend of many pilots,” that is, the Russian pilots who fly in routinely to pick up perch and — the film argues — brings in weapons for the endless African wars. When Eliza’s coworkers sit together in a bar, they share stories in voices at once rueful and resigned. They see no options, they only survive, and yet they generously speak to the documentary makers, offering glimpses into their tenuous, stressful experiences. They face AIDS, violent johns, and a culture built to use them and reject them at the same time (“If you sleep with a whore, just beat her,” reads graffiti in the background of one shot). They have no hope, and yet, they live.

Another scene that threads through the film is an interview with Raphael, currently hired as a security guard at a “research facility,” for a dollar a night. As he sees it, while he has the job because the previous guard was killed, he’s lucky to be employed at all (when asked what he thinks about the possibility that warfare, so pervasive throughout Africa — say, Rwanda and Congo — might erupt as well in Tanzania, he dryly observes that war is good for the economy — rich men get richer, certainly, but poor men get paid too).

Such individual interviews are framed repeatedly by conferences on the effects of globalization. While these authorities, academics, and policymakers watch documentaries on the local devastation, they agree that this sort of news would be bad for tourism, so perhaps they need to find more “positive” points to make in their press releases. Because globalization is generally good for Europe, the conference-goers find ways to spin the deleterious effects on other, poverty-stricken resource areas.

Most compellingly, Darwin’s Nightmare reveals connections among the many pieces of its seeming puzzle by indirection. If some of these links are made heavy-handedly (an owner of one of the perch processing factories turns on one of those fish-on-a-plaques that flap to the tune of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”), others are dropped quietly and irrefutably. Interviews with the pilots begin with their refusals to acknowledge they might be bringing something in to Africa, to allowances that, well, yes, they are moving cargo, though whether or not its actual guns, well, who can say? Denial, greed, and disregard for other living beings — these are the components of the Nile perch story.

The film opens and closes on images of the airport in West Tanzania, where cargo planes land and take off. They serve here as metaphors and literal embodiments of the promise of escape, the vague concept of another world where poverty, AIDS, warfare, and famine don’t limit horizons by definition.