by SARAH ROWLAND

The first half of Hubert Sauper’s riveting documentary Darwin’s Nightmare is a pretty straightforward example of how evil and unjust capitalism can be. It all started, we’re told, sometime in the ’60s, when someone, for reasons unknown, had the bright idea to introduce the Nile Perch fish to Lake Victoria. This seemingly harmless experiment sparked a series of events that turned life in Tanzania into hell on Earth.

First, the veracious predator proved to be the fittest and annihilated all the indigenous marine life. However, the irreparable ecological disaster was only the beginning. It wasn’t long before the demand for the Perch’s meaty fillets in Japan and Europe attracted manufacturing vultures from around the world to set up shop in the coastal villages surrounding the lake. They, of course, started raping the waters daily, leaving virtually nothing for the locals to eat. Enter starvation and desperation. But wait, there’s more.

To export these goods, Russian cargo planes were commissioned, and with the lonely homesick pilots came destitute women from the back country to service them. Hello AIDS epidemic, orphaned children, drug addiction, street violence… and on and on.

Now it would be easy to blame those pesky Perch, but as Sauper points out in his movie, without a plentiful supply of planes on hand, exporting fish wouldn’t have been a such a viable venture for these manufacturers. His film makes the case that the Perch was just an arbitrary product to cover the cost of the planes’ return trips. So the big question is not what are the planes exporting but rather, what are the planes importing? Well, here’s a clue: There’s a war going on about two countries over.

“If four million people died in Eastern Congo in the last few years, and we agree that Africans are not producing their own arms, then who is bringing it there? It’s not Air Canada or Air France,” says the Austrian director, who’s calling from his Paris home.

Masters of disguise

It took four years and several separate trips to the heart of darkness to dig up enough research to support this theory. It also took various false identities to gain access to the runways. When he and his assistant director Sandor Rieder weren’t posing as Australian businessmen, they were pretending to be Russian co-pilots. But despite their many disguises, the two-person crew still managed to rouse suspicion.

“We constantly got in trouble with the authorities,” Sauper says. “Europeans with cameras shouldn’t be sneaking around airports where they unload bombs. But what’s strange is the one time we got arrested, we didn’t exactly know why. And then we found out after two days of being in captivity that they thought we were making pornographic movies. We almost started to laugh when they told us, but we decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to mock a narcotic chief commander.”

A pilot confesses

Even though arms dealing may be a morally repugnant way to earn a living, it is technically legal in many parts of the world. Still, Sauper had a hard time getting any of the pilots to confess their real purpose in Tanzania. That is, until a self-reflective aviator finally confessed that he was particularly disgusted with himself at Christmas time when he brings weapons to the starving children, whilst taking away fish from them to line the bellies of well-fed Euro kids.

“I knew that that moment had to happen for the movie,” says Sauper, who cultivated a three-year friendship with his film’s star in order to get him to open up on camera. “But I was prepared for him to keep up the lie and never admit what he was really doing. If that had happened, I would have needed to work more journalistically and shown the bombs on the plane, which was pretty easy to do.”

This brings us to the next point: though his film has received rave reviews thus far, some criticize him for not presenting enough evidence to link arms dealing with fish exporting. If he had the footage of the bombs on the planes, why not just use it?

“I didn’t need to,” he says. “I mean, there are always going to be people so ignorant that if a gas station explodes and they don’t see the match, they say it didn’t happen. I just ignore them. They’re bullshitters. And I’m not making movies for those ignoramuses. I’m making movies for people who think for themselves and want to inform themselves.”

Darwin’s Nightmare opens Friday, June 10

>> Movie Listings