darwin's nightmare
Stayed late at Serpentine last night for the screening of 'Darwin's Nightmare', a documentary set in Tanzania about the introduction of Nile Perch into Lake Victoria and the economic/social fallout.
Apparently one day as a scientific experiment someone put one Nile Perch into the lake and twenty years later there is basically no other life in Lake Victoria. The Lake itself is staggeringly large so this is astonishing. Nile Perch are also staggeringly large - about a metre across. So huge businesses are set up exporting the fillets of this fish to Europe. The President of Tanzania and the World Social Forum and all those big European development bodies are super happy. The downside is that the planes exporting the fish are also conveniently bringing in guns to support the wars in the DRC and Rwanda. Nobody in Tanzania can actually afford to buy their own fish and end up eating the stinking mess left over. Child prostitution, drug use, AIDS, everyone living on less than a dollar a day.
Frankly the documentary was badly edited, slightly ethically questionable, and didn't really sew up its argumentation - everything you find out has already been revealed by its blurb (roughly the blurb above) and many question marks aren't really explained (who precisely is selling the guns? Why can't locals just go and fish for their own Nile Perch?) so the documentary has to have a different role, which I suppose is to be illustrative and to show the realities of various people. But he doesn't get much deeper than short conversations with prostitutes ('Yes, I would like to go to school'), street children (fighting each other for handfuls of rice), Russian airline pilots ('I don't talk about politics') and so on. He meets an amazing young teenage artist who paints scenes from this life with sober insight, but you never find out the context - he's essentially presented as one of the street kids but paints are expensive, he's wearing a clean shirt - there's a touch of racism to the lack of acknowledgment of class structures, a touch of offhand uniformity to this black poverty - and the editing is suspect also, the director has gone for a drink with these three prostitutes and they talk of their lives in general; much later in the film you see them together again and have just found out about their friend who has just been murdered by a client - and you realise these two scenes are the same one (same clothes, same bar) edited to make it look like separate moments. There's something ethically awful in that, the realisation that the plain interview footage from earlier in the film is actually a moment of intense grief which, through editing, has been severed from the footage because it didn't suit the director's desire for a neat exposition.
Apparently one day as a scientific experiment someone put one Nile Perch into the lake and twenty years later there is basically no other life in Lake Victoria. The Lake itself is staggeringly large so this is astonishing. Nile Perch are also staggeringly large - about a metre across. So huge businesses are set up exporting the fillets of this fish to Europe. The President of Tanzania and the World Social Forum and all those big European development bodies are super happy. The downside is that the planes exporting the fish are also conveniently bringing in guns to support the wars in the DRC and Rwanda. Nobody in Tanzania can actually afford to buy their own fish and end up eating the stinking mess left over. Child prostitution, drug use, AIDS, everyone living on less than a dollar a day.
Frankly the documentary was badly edited, slightly ethically questionable, and didn't really sew up its argumentation - everything you find out has already been revealed by its blurb (roughly the blurb above) and many question marks aren't really explained (who precisely is selling the guns? Why can't locals just go and fish for their own Nile Perch?) so the documentary has to have a different role, which I suppose is to be illustrative and to show the realities of various people. But he doesn't get much deeper than short conversations with prostitutes ('Yes, I would like to go to school'), street children (fighting each other for handfuls of rice), Russian airline pilots ('I don't talk about politics') and so on. He meets an amazing young teenage artist who paints scenes from this life with sober insight, but you never find out the context - he's essentially presented as one of the street kids but paints are expensive, he's wearing a clean shirt - there's a touch of racism to the lack of acknowledgment of class structures, a touch of offhand uniformity to this black poverty - and the editing is suspect also, the director has gone for a drink with these three prostitutes and they talk of their lives in general; much later in the film you see them together again and have just found out about their friend who has just been murdered by a client - and you realise these two scenes are the same one (same clothes, same bar) edited to make it look like separate moments. There's something ethically awful in that, the realisation that the plain interview footage from earlier in the film is actually a moment of intense grief which, through editing, has been severed from the footage because it didn't suit the director's desire for a neat exposition.