Pepe is the offspring of one Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos. His tragic story was given voice by director Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias, who asked for at least two hours for discussion before the screening in the Small Hall on Thursday.
“The first thing I wrote was the hippo’s monologue. Pepe as a creature is the result of a colonisation process. I knew he needed to be patchworked from multiple languages without actually knowing which he speaks,” the director justified the creative use of Spanish, Afrikaans and one of the local tribal languages. The fantastical film, which won the Silver Bear for directing at this year’s Berlinale, is a blend of a fiction film and documentary. The film uses both genres to build a tragic mosaic of the fate of those who do not know where they live and die. “The key idea was that there are ‘some’ who can be part of our society. And ‘some’ who can never fit in,” the director revealed about the sense of uprooting.The footage of live hippos is breathtaking. “Animals, in a way, respect tradition, so you have to spend time with them to get them used to you. This is especially true for hippos, who can recognise you by smell,” the independent filmmaker said, adding that he shot the documentary layer on 16mm film in the company of three other crew members. “That was the official part of the shoot. The unofficial one was that before the filming I moved to the town where Pepe had lived,” said the filmmaker.
