“Darwin’s Nightmare is a story about people between the North and the South, about globalization … and about fish”

The fish are Nile perch, a small number of which were released into the East African Lake Victoria in the 1960s – an attempt to promote the regional fishing industry with this prolific food fish. Today, over 400 of the fish species native to the lake at the time are considered extinct – they have fallen victim to the voracious predator, which is sold all over the world as Lake Victoria perch. But Hubert Sauper’s film is about more than just the ecological disaster: it also looks at the economic and social conditions linked to its cause. The majority of the population around the fish farms on Lake Victoria live and work in unimaginable conditions, and only a few profit from the global export hit. And it leaves the country in airplanes that were previously loaded with weapons…  “I could tell Darwin’s nightmare in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be a diamond, in Honduras a banana, and in Angola, Nigeria or Iraq black oil,” says Hubert Sauper about his film: “The success story of the Victoria perch is repeated again and again in poor countries with different protagonists and products, but a success story with dubious benefits for the respective region.