Darwin's Nightmare

Comment by Dennis Lim

"The Nile perch was introduced to Lake Victoria some 40 to 50 years ago, an apparent attempt to replenish the overfished waters that led to the extinction of hundreds of indigenous species. An oily-fleshed fish that reaches over six feet in length, the Lates niloticus rapidly emerged as the fittest specimen in its new habitat, depleting the food supply and preying on smaller fish (including its young). In a 2001 report, the World Conservation Union deemed the Nile perch one of the planet's 100 "worst invasive alien species." This ongoing ecological disaster happens to be the basis for a multimillion-dollar business: Tanzania , which owns 49 percent of Lake Victoria , is the main exporter of perch to the European Union. Bitter ironies come thick and fast in Hubert Sauper's essential documentary Darwin 's Nightmare, and the most obvious one may be that this unnatural abundance of a profitable protein source—an economic godsend, if you ask the on-message factory managers and government officials—coexists with inhuman levels of famine and poverty.

Quietly outraged and actively upsetting, Darwin 's Nightmare spirals out from a case study of one cannibalistic killer to a far bigger and more rapacious fish. The ruthless supremacy of the Nile perch and its devastating effect on the lake's ecosystem constitute a gruesomely resonant metaphor for the impact of global capitalism on local industry. From intimate camcorder interviews with fishermen, fishery workers, cargo pilots, and the prostitutes and street kids on the fringes of this lakeshore economic network, Sauper, an Austrian-born, Paris-based documentarian, constructs a detailed seismograph of predatory free trade's ripple effect."

The best movie I have seen in at least year's time.
PLEASE CHECK THE WEBSITE FOR A REVIEW
or see wiki for details and contraversies...
"In the Eastern Congo alone, equal the number of deaths of September the casualties of war on each single day 11th in New York."

"I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds,
in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil."