Darwin's Nightmare

During the 60s a new fish was introduced into Lake Victoria. Voraciously predatory, the Nile Perch multiplied rapidly, and killed off almost the entire stock of native fish. Now the Nile Perch is exported all around the world, whilst the lakeside villagers who are completely dependent on the fishing industry for their living are too impoverished to afford to eat it. Hubert Sauper's incisive documentary, sparked by his earlier film, Kisangani Diary, develops from an almost whimsical beginning into a damning analysis of the global economic and political interests at play in one of Africa's most beautiful and fertile regions: the huge ex-Soviet cargo planes which fly in to load up with fish arrive packed with Kalishnikovs and ammunition for deployment in the civil wars of central Africa. Often filming undercover, Sauper and his collaborator Sandor Rieder managed to gain unprecedented access to many of the people involved, from the fishermen and their families to the Asian factory owners, the EU commissioners and the pilots themselves. With the deceptively intimate feel of an ethnographic study, Darwin's Nightmare is a comprehensively broad ranging expose of the destructive mechanisms of our time.