Fish mage nobody saves the world2/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Orphans become street kids who sniff gas and melt the plastic fish containers to inhale the fumes. The fisherman, and sometimes their wives and children, die of AIDS. ![]() Prostitutes infect them with HIV, which gets brought back to the villages. Fishermen who were once farmers leave their villages for long periods to fish. Using a minimalist documentary style - there is no narration, everything is told through its characters - Darwin’s Nightmare illuminates with simple clarity how the export of this monocrop to Europe is connected to the decay of local society. introduce participants in the style of a morality play: Sergey, Dima, Jura, Vladimir and Stanislav, the ‘fish cargo pilots’ Dimond, ‘factory owner, turns big fish into small fillets’ the street children Msafiri, Franky, Shabani, Mustafa, Josephu, ‘strolling the streets of “fish” city’ Raphael, ‘for one dollar a night he protects the National Fisheries Institute’ Eliza the ‘girlfriend of many pilots’ (Source: Hughes 2012, p.255). crudely typed and somewhat theatrical intertitles. What unfolds before our eyes is a slow-moving and deeply affecting tragedy, a tragedy with both ecological and social dimensions (Source: Jones 2008, p.82). I especially liked the raw reality of the film nowadays we are constantly presented with images of third world suffering that distance 'us' from 'them' - this film does not allow that sort of comfort thinking, but more highlights this issue as part of a colossal world injustice (Source: Eloise 2004, np link). The agonized human face of globalization… The survival of nearly everyone in the film is connected to the fish: the prostitutes who keep company with the pilots in the hotel bars the displaced farmers who handle the rotting carcasses the night watchman, armed with a bow and a few poison-tipped arrows, who guards a fish-related research institute (Source: Scott 2005, np link). This is the dark side of globalisation shown in micro format, and it’s not a pretty sight (Source: Anon 2009a, p.22). ![]() This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots (Source: Anon nda, np link).ĭarwin’s Nightmare is essentially a story of the folly of man, showing how a simple decision to introduce a new breed of fish into a lake has led to environmental disaster, destroyed the local community now blighted by prostitution and drugs and helped to nurture the African arms trade. ![]() Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. Sometime in the 1960′s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. Descriptionsĭarwin's Nightmare the chilling story of the social and environmental destruction wrought in Central Africa as cargo planes from Europe delivered load after load of arms to the region, before heading home filled with the choicest fillets of Nile perch (Source: Davidson 2013, np link). ![]()
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