In 2009, Pepe the hippopotamus was shot by hunters in north-western Colombia.
Hippos aren’t native to the region, but this individual had been brought there from the wilds of southern Africa to be a specimen in the private zoo of the famed drug baron Pablo Escobar. Eventually escaping the confines of the crime lord’s Hacienda Napoles, Pepe took up residence in the waters of the Magdalena River before being sought out and killed by alarmed locals. These are the bare bones of the real-life story that Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias has freely adapted into his sophomore feature, Pepe. A docudrama with tinges of the experimental and liberal dollops of the surreal, it is a perplexing but enormously compelling odyssey playfully riffing on colonialism and what it means to be out of place.
The film’s opening might feel a little confusing; it combines a cartoon about a hippo named Pepe with channel-hopping footage of the media covering Pablo Escobar’s death and some ambiguous docudrama footage that might involve drug-smuggling and military action against cartels. Where it settles after a fitful seven minutes is with a group of hippos in the Okavango River, one of whom supposedly narrates the rest of the film in a variety of languages and voices. Pepe proceeds to recount his life story from the great delta in the sky but unmoored from the physical world and given faculties he never experienced in life, it is a shifting and jumbled experience.
That is not intended to convey that it is an unpleasant one, though. Pepe’s primary voice (provided by Johon Narvaez) can’t help but invoke that of Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt, particularly when the hippo’s natural repetitive grunt sounds so much like a low, rumbling chuckle. As he ruminates on his position as the first and last hippo killed in South America he comes across as a somewhat befuddled Buddha unsure exactly who is or where he came from. Additionally voiced by Fareed Matjila, Harmony Ahalwa and Shifafure Faustinus, he drifts between personas and southwest African history – from the pre-colonial era to apartheid.
The conceit of the hippo’s philosophising perspective will potentially put some people off, but it entwines quite pointedly with wider themes around the nature of colonial oppression and exploitation and the forced migration of people from Africa through slavery. Although Pepe’s story is of course one about an animal being yanked from their natural habitat on the whim of a criminal from faraway lands, the parallels are abundant and De Los Santos Arias stresses them through the narrative vignettes that illustrate the hippo’s journey, particularly the early examples.
One of these sees a safari guide speaking to German tourists from the front of a bus as they traverse the Namibian landscape. He asks his local assistant to contribute but continually interrupts him with snide asides and meanspirited chortles about their uncivilised beliefs. When he dares to describe the danger of the indigenous hippopotamuses he is immediately reprimanded – their esteemed guests don’t want to hear about that. Later, two boys are tasked with driving a cargo lorry to their boss’s (Escobar) compound. It’s evident that Pepe is inside, but De Los Santos Arias constructs the scenes like those depicting human traffickers.
Later the action settles into a more typical narrative film rhythm, following the inhabitants of a particular stretch of the Magdalena River. At this point, Pepe largely recedes from the action, instead living as the monster in the water that the fishermen are increasingly afraid will come for them. The film uses Pepe’s presence – as captive, as escapee – to delve into several small stories, often intimating that its characters are similarly trapped, adrift, or unsure of quite where and who they are. The change of pace is a little mystifying at the time, but the consequence is that this meandering fable becomes anchored to something concrete. Suddenly the hippo with the funny voice is a little less affected and the nuances of his existence – both as individual and allegory – come into focus. That’s not to say that Pepe doesn’t occasionally veer towards artsy pretension, but at its core, it remains an offbeat fairy tale with genuine soul.
Director, screenplay, editing, music: Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias
Cast: Johon Narvaez, Sor aria Rios, Fareed Matjila, Harmony Ahalwa, Jorge Puntillon Garcia, Shifafure Faustinus, Steven Alexander, Nicolas Marin Caly
Producers: Pablo Lozano, Tanya Valette, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias
Cinematography: Camilo Soratti, Roman Lechapelier, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias
Sound design: Nahuel Palenque, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias
Production design: Daniel Rincon, Melania Freires
Production companies: Monte & Culebra (Dominican Republic), 4 A 4 Productions (France), Pandora Film (Germany), Joe’s Vision (Namibia)
Venue: Berlinale (Main Competition)
In Spanish, Afrikaans, Mbukushu, German
122 minutes
