Pepe is tough to place into phrases. The enigmatic movie exemplifies sensible filmmaking but fumbles in its esotericism. Within the broadest phrases, Pepe is a movie a few real-life Colombian hippopotamus’s remaining ideas as he features the power to recount his complete life. It is usually about language, colonialism, gender politics, people mysticism, existentialism, and typically hippo biology.
Because the story goes, Pablo Escobar imported numerous unique animals to his Hacienda Nápoles within the Nineteen Eighties. When he was killed, 4 leftover hippos started emigrate and populate alongside the Magdalena River. By 2023, the hippo inhabitants had grown to roughly 169. Pepe follows this narrative, beginning with the titular hippo’s dad and mom in 1979 Südwestafrika (now Namibia) and ending with Pepe’s homicide in 2009. “Murder” is a key phrase as Pepe prioritizes ascribing company to the hippo to explain his emotional journey.
When Pepe is exiled from his herd (alpha male hippos exile any males born), he narrates to the viewers, “This is how I realized that a hierarchy exists — first with the arrival of Pablito [Escobar]. And then, when I left the herd my story could only be told when it became their story.” Director Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias makes use of Pepe’s voice to look at language in a postcolonial framework. Pepe, a hippo, speaks in German, Spanish, and Afrikaans whereas questioning how he is ready to communicate in addition to perceive that these sounds aren’t regular for a hippo. He realizes he’s a topic in a narrative he can’t even inform as a result of surely he’s a hippo (paying homage to how Paul Gilroy’s 1993 ebook The Black Atlantic connects the transatlantic slave commerce to the double-consciousness inside Black Individuals who reconcile their identities every day).
Okavango River in Pepe
On the 2024 Berlinale press convention for Pepe, De Los Santos Arias was requested how he conceptualized his movie. He answered that the present scenario concerning the Colombian authorities and hippos doesn’t curiosity him: “What I was interested in was all this symbolism.” The director is in a precarious place when the present sociopolitical actuality of Colombia’s hippos isn’t explicitly acknowledged, however this symbolism is made fairly obvious when wanting on the movie’s formal components.
Breathtaking cinematography and sound design form the movie: omniscient overhead photographs of the Magdalena River; a barrage of solider’s bullets remodeling into an eclectic drum loop. But a important downside arises the place the middle of subjectivity shifts from Pepe to a few, performed by Jorge Puntillón García and Sor María Ríos, and their human melodrama. Candelario, a fisherman, turns into obsessive about a (then) unknown animal within the river and confides in his spouse, Betania, who accuses him of dishonest and utilizing the river beast as an excuse to keep away from confrontation. Inside Afrikaans folklore, hippo assaults point out {that a} partner is being untrue. But when a movie is so decided to let a philosophizing hippo communicate, then ought to it not stay steadfast on that distinctive motif? To decenter Pepe’s articulated revelations halts the creativeness inside the movie’s magical realism. Tales about animal subjectivity can unveil many in any other case hidden absurdities of our society.
Nonetheless from Pepe
Pepe is not like most movies launched in latest reminiscence, notably because it comes from Dominican filmmakers working to fight cultural exclusion from worldwide conversations. De Los Santos Arias is a filmmaker I like for his political intentionality and poetic sensibility; he explores what it means to be a Caribbean filmmaker in an business that hardly acknowledges his area. Throughout his final moments, Pepe says, “What’s authentic and false, what’s serious and playful, the real deed and the shadow of my life. A baroque mixture, excessive, opaque, heterogeneous … difficult words that I will never understand how they got here.”
Pepe is a hippo born from Southwest African dad and mom who had been forcibly moved from their native lands to Columbia. Suffocated with a language and tradition that was not their very own, these hippos tailored to create a sustainable habitat. Nonetheless, because the hippo inhabitants grew, the ecological threat and hazard to people made authorities start to hunt this “invasive species.” Pepe’s martyrdom (just like that of Harambe in 2016) drew tons of worldwide consideration to animal rights consciousness and conservation. Hippos are thought-about a weak species with a worldwide inhabitants of roughly 130,000.
It’s disarming how captivatingly lovely hippos are in Pepe, however the fact of the matter is that people are sometimes too ensconced in their very own narratives to note.
Jorge Puntillón García in Pepe
Pepe is at the moment out there to stream on Mubi.