On fishes and men...
Mar. 25th, 2005 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Sometimes documentaries can kick fictions' ass. I saw "Darwin's Nightmare", a French/Belgium/Austrian documentary on Wednesday and despite its flaws, this is a film that everybody should see.
It's "funny" because the following day I went to see "Million Dollar Baby", and then I thought that watching Darwin's Nightmare was like being punched, it was raw just like boxing can be, hard and human at the same time...the only difference is that the viewers keep being punched again and again, the viewers aren't champions, they can't smile like Maggie in Eastwood's movie, they can only feel guilty....
The more this cautionary tale progresses the more we sink into the nightmare, and fighting seems to be just an illusion. Because you can't fight back such disturbing truth...Unlike boxing, the punches don't make you blind, they make your eyes wild open and prevent you from closing them.
It's a documentary about globalization, about human people between the North and the South, about the consequences of an economic system whose logic is implacable and causes other implacable logics (like how wars come in a handy eventually, for everybody!).
It takes place in Tanzania, but I guess it could have been filmed in many places of the Third World. Some time in the 1960's a new fish, The Nile Persh, was introduced in the Lake Victoria, probably as a little scientific experiment....The film doesn't explain who or why. But the fact is that Nile Persh, being a voracious predator, extinguished almost the enitre stock of the native species. This huge fish (I didn't know that Nile Pershes were such scary monsters!) multiplied fast and produced a new buisness of white filets exported all around the world, especially in Europe. Filets that are very expensive, filets that fishermen and people living along the shores can't afford. The focus of the movie is not the lake's ecosystem but the personal stories of those who work and live along the shores of Lake Victoria, fishermen, work-hunters, prostitutes, street children...the Russian pilots whose cargos carry the tons of fresh Nile perch destined for the Russian and European markets.
The irony is that Tanzania itself is struggling to avoid famine, so a secondary industry has grown up drying and roasting the decayed, discarded fish carcasses. The whole thing is grim and some scenes are almost unbearable. Things have evolved into a nightmare indeed. At the end of the day that "cannibale fish" could be seen as a metaphor of the European predators, and the scene showing the EU-commisionners congratulating themselves about the infrastructures provided by Europe might be the cruellest ironic one.