Darwin's Man in Africa

That kind of compassion and mutual recognition is a constant in Sauper’s work, be it a student short on circuses or his two films on African circles of hell. Though Darwin’s Nightmare concerns the global forces that have converged in one place, Lake Victoria in western Tanzania, Sauper is no muckraker. “I’m not out to prove anything,” he argues when asked why he doesn’t show piles of corpses. “Switch on CNN and you can see that. It’s not my work to prove things to you, to show that there are poor people in Africa or that prostitutes are dying of AIDS. I don’t want to start proving things. I want to connect things you might not have connected.”

Sauper does that, sure, but he does something far more important: He makes the real people of Darwin’s Nightmare inhabit the imaginative space of fiction, and he makes us empathize with them in the way that normally only drama can pull off. He connects us to them with great specificity: When the final credits roll, every single person is identified by first name and surname, even the kids sniffing glue in the streets. And he carries out his casting with care. “I do a lot of work to choose who I’m going to use as a character in the film,” he says. “Before you see Rafael [a night watchman] with his poison stick, I’ve already spent two years getting to know him, telling him about my life, explaining why I’m in Africa, what I’m afraid of. I tell him all this, and finally the point comes when he or the Russian pilot [another major character] also wants to tell his story.” It’s then that Sauper turns on his camera. “I am filming my own relation to those people, my connection, my own fascination.”

Photo by Coop 99

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The title Darwin’s Nightmare refers to a cannibalistic predator, the Nile perch, that has taken over Lake Victoria. It seems an inevitable focus, but Sauper sees it differently: “I followed the thin red line of the fish,” he says. “But I could have followed the commerce of diamonds or crude oil or gold. For a movie, the fish is more effective, because it hits your stomach. You don’t eat crude oil. Filming fish is more rewarding for a filmmaker.” Sauper has a glint in his eye, but he sighs. “People ask me, how can you keep on living after seeing such terrible things? But it’s the other way around. I have the best life! You can’t imagine. I look for things that some people don’t want to see, and from these impressions, I make my own expression.”

Hubert Sauper has made enemies in high places — the Tanzanian government sees the film as an attack on its country, and the fisheries bureau is furious that Sauper focused his camera on its night watchman instead of its CEO. But as long as he keeps making friends where no one else cares to look, and treating them with respect, he will be unstoppable. Having completed the first two parts of his planned African trilogy, he’s currently back in Paris, his home base, raising money — something the success of Darwin’s Nightmare makes a little easier — for a third. I’ll be waiting.?