Darwin's Nightmare

no cert

3 / 5

  1. Darwin's Nightmare
  2. Production year: 2004
  3. Country: Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): NC
  5. Runtime: 107 mins
  6. Directors: Hubert Sauper
  7. More on this film

This subtle and intriguing documentary by Hubert Sauper says a great many valuable things about Africa, about ecology, about globalisation and about international politics. Lake Victoria in Tanzania is currently in the midst of an evolutionary crisis: once a bio-diverse home for all sorts of fishes and plants, it is now an aquatic wasteland due to the introduction of the Nile perch, a fleshy predator cultivated for export, heading for bargain-price tins in EU supermarkets. The local economy now depends on these Nile perch, fish which are destroying their own eco-system and each other. Meanwhile, Aids and HIV are rife, due to a growing ancillary trade in prostitution servicing the fish business's transient incomers, and there's something even more disquieting. Locals believe that planes arrive empty and depart full of fish. But is the Nile perch connection a front for weapon-importing? The locals Sauper interviews are perceptive and angry about the way they are being exploited by the rest of the world.

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