Pepe

Director: Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

7 June 2024

See

Follows Pepe the hippo who broke free of Pablo Escobar’s private zoo, with multi-lingual narration from the hippo. This film was the winner of the Silver Bear prize at Berlinale, is technically innovative combining fiction and non-fiction various media. Director Los Santos Arias hopes viewers will “Embrace these images and new forms of narrative.” Vignettes of Pepe interactions with people on his journey, like a Namibian tour guide, Colombian fisherman and his irritable wife are tied together with Pepe’s resonate voice over.

Think

After finishing his previous film director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, went to Columbia to visit friends. In the house of Camilo Restrepo, a painter, there was a sculpture of 1000 green army soldiers. The painter retold the story of Pepe wrongly. When a hippo is exiled from it’s herd, it tries to find another herd. That’s when Santos Arias decided on his the narrative thread, of Pepe going down the river looking for others and not getting another herd, because Esobar’s hippos were the only ones in South America. The truth is hippos leave the herd to expand their territory. But the problem remains the same, a lack of hippos and South American rivers are much bigger than African ones.

Feel

Comparing the film to Gunda, Cow, or Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Santos Aria’s has a rule when making a film if someone suggests, ‘you have to see this film’, “I don’t see it.”

He came up with his own animal narrative philosophy based on The poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant. That if, “Colonisation is a virus, [South Americans] are patient zero.”

Aspirationally the melting pot of cultures that make up countries like Colombia “Keep their differences but unite.” That’s why Pepe needs to speak all the languages he does in his narration: Afrikaans (itself a Creole of Dutch and Zulu), and of course Spanish with a Colombian accent. 

The Official story is Escobar’s hippos came from Sam Diego zoo. It was a German Hunter who came to Columbia in the 1960s that killed the anima which escaped. The army didn’t know how to chase it. To the director's mind this is a colonial circularity, and he asks the audience ‘How can we escape from this? This is a process of decolonisation.”  

Films shown in cinemas from Star Wars thirty to fifty years ago became very important in production of subjectivity. These movies become the reality of people, what they imagine for the future. And Santos Aria’s believes “We continue to build the future from a western perspective. I hope this film will show kids how the future can be.”