Hell on Earth - Darwin's Nightmare.

This week I saw a fascinating documentary in the theater called ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ which really gives a whole new meaning to the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’.

The Austrian maker Hubert Sauper shows a picture of pure hell on earth and this hell is located in Tanzania by the shore of Lake Victoria.

The film shows different facets of the nightmare. First the ecological nightmare – the destruction of the biological diversity of the lake after a predator, the Nile perch was introduced in the lake in the 60s as some possible ‘scientific’ experience. As a result the alien perch has become the only means of survival to the local fishermen’s villages around the lake, making them more and more dependent on the Nile Perch filet factories run by Indians with European subsidies. The fish is sold to Europe and Japan making it so expensive that the local villages are left with nothing but fish heads, bones and tails which they boil and eat. There is one scene where you see kids literally fighting for a handful of rice while the camera is still running… and later sniffing local-made glue. There is no music and no comment but the breathing of the 12 year old kid inhaling the glue.

In the background you see planes landing with empty cargo (or with weapons sold to neighboring countries at war) and taking off with the fish. The interviews of the Russian pilots show that the misery extents far greater than imagined. The other people in this documentary are either forced into prostitution, dying of AIDS or violence but all have one thing in common: they are just trying to get by however they can.
Another shocking scene shows a woman drying the leftover carcasses of the fish (once the filets have been) saying ‘I’m not too badly off’ while the maggots wriggle around her bare feet.

The film is hard to watch. Really. It gives you pause to think. Those people’s reality is so removed from ours, that it is hard to even imagine humanity in such atrocious hopeless environment. The strength of the documentary is not necessarily the investigation nor its critique of globalization, it is rather the impressive testimonies it presents.

It is a scary illustration of the hellish end-result of our eating cheap Nile perch filet bought at our local supermarket.