Darwin's Nightmare | Telescope Film
Darwin's Nightmare

Darwin's Nightmare

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Darwin's Nightmare is a 2004 Austrian-French-Belgian documentary film written and directed by Hubert Sauper, dealing with the environmental and social effects of the fishing industry around Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Some time in the 1960s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

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What are critics saying?

90

Village Voice by Dennis Lim

Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.

90

The New York Times by Dana Stevens

Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck

An uncompromising portrait of how global capitalism can exploit an area's resources to the point of near annihilation.

80

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Far more than mere fish tale, Sauper's dark, devastating documentary profiles a socio-ecological nightmare with unimaginable consequences, and it's one of the best films about the ugly reality of the global marketplace.

80

Variety by David Rooney

Somewhat haphazardly organized yet fascinatingly detailed and enriched by the candor and dignity of its shockingly deprived interview subjects.

75

San Francisco Chronicle

At times quite powerful.

75

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

Sauper captures a world in which life and death are treated with equal practicality - and disregard. His camera is unflinching; your gaze may not be quite so steady.

75

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jennie Punter

As confusing, horrific and unsettling as a nightmare can be, at least you wake up and the memory fades. Darwin's Nightmare, tragically, is not a dream, but rather a haunting, beautifully made reality check well worth waking up to.

70

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

Darwin's Nightmare would be just another "ain't it a shame" piece were it not for the way Sauper gradually reveals how all this human misery might play out.

63

New York Post

The documentary tries to pin Africa's suffering on capitalism, but dances around the real problem. Africa starves because corrupt governments own the natural resources and export them to buy weapons to keep their people at bay.