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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unlike Any Documentary You'll Ever See, July 8, 2006
DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE is truly that: a nightmare. Filmed on-location in Tanzania along the banks of the massive Lake Victoria, director Hubert Sauper puts the lens of his camera in the face of everyone involved in this human atrocity ...from those who aid it, to those at the bottom of its global circumstances.
The focus is on the gigantic Nile Perch, a freshwater fish of unbelievable size, who was unfortunately introduced to Lake Victoria and has decimated the native fish population. On the upside, however, is the new economy brought by the Nile Perch. Million dollar fish packing operations abound and jobs are available ...but only to a few hundred natives. The remainder live in squalor and on starvation's doorstep. All of the fish, without exception, is flown out of Africa to richer, more affluent, neighboring continents (mostly Europe). The money being made by the IMF and a few select companies is impressive, but can it last?
Mr. Sauper has done something extraordinary. Without putting in any bias, he has allowed this story to unfold on its own. I've never, EVER, seen a documentary like this. I was appalled by the educational system in Tanzania (basically nonexistent) and yet startled by the realization that none of the Tanzanians know or care about the globalization that is causing much of their problems (again, an educational issue). One of the natives that Mr. Sauper interviewed even wished that war would spill over from Angola and into Tanzania so that he could have "better work". Incredible!
AIDS, of course, is an ever present item in Africa, and Tanzania is no exception. But the additional problem here is that there are few facilities to care for the infected. On many of the large islands on Lake Victoria, there are no doctors, hospitals, or dispensaries. Prostitution is widespread as women become widowed and have no source of income. Children are on the street, fighting for fists full of rice, early victims of AIDS after losing their parents. And what is the world doing about this ...?
The hidden side-story in the documentary is "what's on the planes when they land in Tanzania." High-level officials say, "Nothing." But truth be told (by one of the pilots interviewed) sometimes weapons are shipped in on the planes, destined for war-torn areas of Africa. No food. No humanitarian supplies. Nothing else makes it in to Tanzania. We (the world) take from Africa, and all we give it is more death and destruction. This isn't stated directly in the film, but is easily surmised through the interviews.
Finally, there's the airport. Almost as much a character in the film as anyone, this landing field (I hesitate to call it an airport) is a ramshackle building with flies, bees, and broken equipment, resulting in many airliner mishaps throughout the years. A testament to the unspoken fact that the world has no intentions of developing this area. We'll take until there's nothing left, then we'll leave Tanzania and her people to her final verdict. Death!
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hug Your Children, July 17, 2006
The title 'Darwin's Nightmare' may refer to the infestation of Giant Nile Perch destroying the ecosystem of Lake Victoria, but I suspect it has more to do with how the concept of 'survival of the fittest' is applied to human beings in one of the most awful places on Earth. Children fight over grimy handfuls of rice, with the strongest getting the most, and the gentler weeping over what they have lost (and then starving). These orphans of HIV and other diseases struggle alongside the heavily scarred adults who have somehow survived, prostitution for the women, dangerous, desperate work for the men, and all of them living off the rotting corpses of fish left after the juicy filets have been air transported to European tables (this is a truly horrendous thing, people stacking and handling worm infested fish frames).Tanzania's problems did not begin with this trade of fish that transformed a fishing/agrarian lifestyle into a feeder industry for fish factories, but the film certainly implies that it did make them worse. Director Sauper has captured the despair of the Tanzanian people, the viciousness of those among them who feed off their pain, and the callousness (or sheer ignorance) of those who profit from it. Yet he also finds grace: A Russian pilot wishing forlornly that he could help all children, and not knowing how, a Tanzanian fishing village leader wearily describing the obvious causes of his people's plight, children rendering down packaging plastic to sniff so they can escape their pathetic lives for a little while.
This sounds like something no one would want to watch, and it certainly would make your average complacent westerner squirm with every remembered whine about the difficulties of their own pampered lives. But Sauper has this STYLE, poetic in presentation, his narrative looping back onto itself to repeat themes again. There are no blunt hammers over the head here. He shows the people and who they are. I suspect Sauper is very brave. He gets into situations that are dicey getting his interviews. And his rapport with people is nuanced, pulling real and thoughtful comments from many of them, even the ones not so nice. Thankfully, he lets us decide who those are. There is little preaching here.
Highly recommended for any teacher trying to show their students a little of what life is like in other parts of the world, and for any one with a heart and a mind.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An important, but flawed film, November 14, 2006
Darwin's Nightmare is indeed a nightmare. The visuals alone make this film a must see because not enough people in the Western European and American hemisphere are aware of the terrible ramifacations of globalization.
The movie begins showing an airplane traveling across the country landscape and communicating with an air traffic controller who's working with broken down equipment and more irritated by the bees buzzing around the dingy office space. Tanzania is an extremely poor country to begin with and the filmmaker spends time displaying the poverty and destitution of Tanzanians living by Lake Victoria. An accidental or purposeful release of Nile Perch into Lake Victoria sometime back in the early 1960's proved disastrous as the fish is a voracious predator and consumed those fish already in existence in the lake. These enormous anadramous fish species came to dominate the lake but also, ironically, provide a means of income for Tanzanians who are able to export the fish to Europeans abroad. The filmmaker interviews the owner of one of the major fish companies in charge of exporting Nile perch and you get the impression that relative to the poverty of the streets, some Tanzanians are benefiting working at the fish plants filleting the Nicle perch. But what we don't see is what kind of income these Tanzanians who work in the fish plants are making and how much better are there living standards. The tragedy, however, is that the fillets get exported abroad and the rest of the fish is left over for the Tanzanians who feed off the fish carcasses and are severely malnourished. The filmmaker keeps coming back to the question of what exactly are the planes bringing to the Tanzanian people and is the country benefitting from this export of fish? Its suggested that military arms are indeed what these plans bring back with them to Tanzania fueling civil wars in these African nations. And the Tanzanians are feeding the Europeans with their Nile Perch. Not exactly an ideal exchange, is it?? The filmmaker, however, does not do an adequate job of interviewing everyone who's relevant to this story and he is biased, without question. Nonetheless, the imagery is so powerful, it leaves you wanting to know more about Tanzania's situation and why it is the country remains so poor and how callous the Western nations come across. I can't recommend this movie enough if only to remind people of the terrible cost of globalization.
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