Customer Reviews

Darwin's Nightmare

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I wondered in the 1980's how cargo jets taking fresh cut flowers from Kenya to Europe fit a business plan.

Here is a thoughtful, sensitive and perceptive documentary that exposes and explains the collective inhumanity of the one to the other, or the consequences of the politics and economics of underdevelopment.

The Nile Perch, an introduced voracious predator has doomed the native Cichlids of Lake Victoria to virtual extinction. However, a business opportunity has been developed. The fish ecology parallels the brutal and lethal injustices of international trade and politics. The pragmatic reality of African exploitation in the context of Eurobusiness is the subject. The stage and actors are in Africa, while the foreign countries, corporations and the elite which set the stage are dramatically absent.

This will be an artful classic in political documentary, but will not likely make it to the public school curriculum.

A French filmaker and director, Hubert Sauper, visited the Tanzanian shores of Lake Victoria in 2003 to shoot a documentary on how the European Community as systematically exploited the fish stock of one of the world's largest bodies of fresh water. What he found in his travels was a complex story that ties together three different sequences of events. One, years ago somebody introduced the Nile perch - intentionally or otherwise - into Lake Victoria. Ever since this monstrous predator fish has clean up on all other aquatic life that kept the algae in check. While this fish has tremendous commericial value as fillets on the dinner tables of European households, it such an aggressive species that it is even eating itself. European buyers and East African fish factories have set a trading cartel that has a monopoly on the catching and processing of the Nile Perch. Huge Russian transport planes land daily to pick up the catch but bring nothing in exchange except the odd shipment of guns for deployment in war zones throughout Africa. The real rub here is that the locals literally have to live off the scraps from the fish plants, and since the region is going through another a nasty drought, the main staple of rice will only be available through UN famine relief efforts. Sauper does a very capable job of capturing the absolute devastation this whole economic scheme has done to the poor Tanzanian fisherman who with his family is literally being starved to death. There is one apocalyptic scene where Sauper comes across a group of Tanzanian children boiling the plastic bags in which the fish were initially packed to collect the hallucinogenic glue for the purposes of sniffing in order to deaden their hunger. This film is a pretty graphic reminder that there is a lot that is terribly wrong and unjust about the world we live in. Many European businessmen and Russian pilots come to cash in on this trade and while they're in the region exploit not only the natural resources but also the human variety, by availing themselves of the sex trade. Watch this film if you want to gain some insight into how depraved we are as a human race when it comes to making money at other people's expense.

If you want to understand how things work in this world, Darwin's Nightmare along with Food Inc. are required viewing. Food Inc. takes you behind the scenes of food production to show you the dirty little secrets the food corporations don't want you to see. You'll see fist hand how they cut corners to produce "cheap" food (in both senses, price & quality). On a positive note, this film will teach you how to make healthier food choices in the grocery store.

Darwin's Nightmare takes place in a fishing village overlooking Lake Victoria, the second largest lake in the world and shows you the misery unrestrained capitalism can cause as told to you directly from the struggling fishermen who scrape a living from it, low paid Ukrainian pilots who fly rickety old cargo airplanes dangerously loaded down with 55 ton loads of Nile Perch fish, women forced to serve them as prostitutes because of poverty and destitute street children who get by, by getting high and fighting over food scraps. Watching the film and seeing Tanzanian factory workers cut, freeze blast and shrink wrap thousands of fish fillets while learning that most Tanzanians can't afford to buy the fish caught in their own lake comes across as a huge injustice. A report at the time of filming indicating that there were 2 million Tanzanians starving and needing food aid from the UN World Food Program drives home the point further. Darwin's Nightmare gives us rare access to these people whose stories never seem to get told by the major media outlets. We must thank Hubert Sauper for allowing his camera to keep rolling as the people of this Tanzanian fishing village tell their stories intimately. This one's not to be missed if you want to know how the other half of the world lives.

I thought this was a very long DVD for what it was. It could have been more informative and done a bit better.

I am really surprised that so many people gave this such a high rating. They obvious saw something I didn't. I saw it as boring and amateur.

What I didn't like about it was that I didn't think there was story that needed to be told. You follow the fish from when it was caught to being processed to being shipped to Europe and the remaining carcases of the fish's body discarded and collected again by the poor. It was about trading food for arms to continue the war in Africa. The lives of the fisherman, the pilots, the villages, the prostitutes and everything else that revolves around these fish.

I guess I am used to really good documentaries and this seamed like this was a final project that he put together for his last year at film school. The story wasn't there and the quality wasn't there. And I have no idea where Darwin fits into all this. The title made me buy it and what a disappointment.

A disturbing movie which raises many questions and answers few. It centers on the fish processing industry in Mwanza, Tanzania. There the Nile Perch, reportedly a predatory foreign species which has taken over Lake Victoria, is caught and frozen, whence it is exported to Europe by the ton. Russian and Ukrainian pilots are said to bring loads of armaments with them when they arrive before taking off with the fish.

The movie offers memorable Bosch-like images of those who are drawn to the city as a result of this industry. Many wretched folk live from the plant offal, there are itinerant fishermen, beggars, assorted prostitutes and glue sniffing orphans in the streets.

What does Darwin have to do with it? Presumably the Nile Perch, the Europeans and the miserable hangers-on are all part of a vicious struggle in which the fittest grow fat at the expense of the weak.

By juxtaposing images of company officials (all ethnic Indians, not Africans, but we do not learn why) with those of the poor, the movie's director seems to invite criticism of the company and its activities.

But what could this criticism be? Should the company shut its doors? Are Tanzanians generally worse off because of the trade in perch? No evidence is provided that this is so, and there is some reason to think otherwise. While the movie does little to trace the local benefits of the fish trade, the processing company is said to employ a thousand people. Was the populace living in happy tranquility before outsiders came? We are not told, though it is clear that much of the truly atrocious suffering shown is of the readily preventable sort due to HIV AIDS.

European nations and the foreign transport companies are accused of profiting from the misery of Africans by exporting arms, and this is a serious moral criticism. However, the arms trade is not shown to harm the city of Mwanza. The town hardly seems awash in modern weapons, as the representative security guard is armed with bow and arrow.

I am no expert on Tanzanian development, but what is irritating about the movie is its message that the misery shown must be due to "business", foreign exploitation or globalization. In reality, anyone who has reflected on the recent changes in Northeast Asia knows how trade and industry have the power to pull nations out of poverty. During the late fifties the Republic of Korea, now prosperous, had a per person GDP like Ghana's. Wealth comes from commerce and the intelligent application of private capital, not from foreign handouts, happy primitivism, government or a sharing attitude. To the extent that Hubert Sauper suggests otherwise he probably does a disservice to the people he depicts.