The whim of a drug trafficker forty years ago led to the installation in Colombia of a non-endemic species: the hippopotamus, an African animal. In 1981, drug trafficker Pablo Escobar took four babies to the zoo he had installed on his extravagant hacienda in the department of Antioquia. The male and three females grew and reproduced, and after Escobar was shot to death in 1993, some specimens were distributed to zoos throughout the country, but others ended up leaving the hacienda and entering the surrounding nature. Result: now about 160 hippos roam freely in the Magdalena River basin, becoming a threat to the habitat. In 2009, the Colombian army killed one of them, whom the country’s press named Pepe.
That is the starting point of the film Pepe, by Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, released this Tuesday in the competition section of the Berlinale, the Berlin film festival, and which is consequently fighting for the Golden Bear and the Silver Bears in the different categories.
Through the cavernous narrating voice-over of Pepe himself – who speaks successively in Afrikaans (a variant language of Dutch spoken in South Africa and Namibia), Mbukushu (Bantu language of Namibia) and Spanish -, we witness his transfer from the African savannah to Escobar’s hacienda in Antioquia, and his subsequent vicissitudes until his death. (In reality, the drug trafficker did not surreptitiously import the four cubs from Africa, but rather he bought them from an American zoo.)
Pepe knows that he is dead, and speaks like a ghost that looks back and reflects. Four actors provide voices and grunts: Fareed Matjila, Jhon Narváez, Harmony Ahalwa and Shifafure Faustinus, and the film was filmed in natural landscapes in Namibia and Colombia. “I come from experimental cinema, where, contrary to what many think, you try, you try, you try; and that’s how it was with the editing of the image, the sound and the music,” De los Santos Arias, director and also screenwriter of this film of unclassifiable genre and style, between drama, documentary, philosophical incursion and -a, explained at a press conference. moments- social and political satire. It’s a shame that it has too much footage, because, although the plot is attractive, its 122 minutes are long.
Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Santo Domingo, 1985) was cautious when he warned that he had not written the script with a Colombian story in mind. “Everything is politicized, especially in Colombia everything related to drug trafficking; There is talk of narco-hippopotamuses, but I didn’t want to tell that, I wanted to tell what emanates from the story of the hippopotamus. Yes, there is a general framework of reference to colonization; I am a Caribbean from the Dominican Republic, the colonization of America began on my island, and I didn’t even know that Germany had had colonies in Africa.” Pepe, a co-production between the Dominican Republic, Germany, France and Namibia, is the fourth feature film by De los Santos Arias, who has a love for documentaries.
