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Entries tagged with 'Tanzania'
Posted Jun. 25, 2007,
Darwin's Nightmare: See It
By Ann Magnuson
I saw the DVD of Hubert Sauper's 2004 documentary Darwin's Nightmare over the weekend and I highly recommend this movie to everyone. It's one of the most difficult things I've ever seen and probably one of the most essential. This YouTube viewer made the above complilation but you can see more scenes from the film here and here.
Sauper's style is at times quite brutal in it's unflinching directness and yet also poetic. There is no narrator and many things are left unexplained, but he captures the uneasy strangeness of Africa, a place where great beauty and great cruelty too often co-exist. The DVD extras feature a very good interview with the director who explains how globilization and social Darwinism are at the root of much of the evil the befalls the poor souls who are unlucky enough to be born poor and in Africa. Vanity Fair and a host of A-list celebrities are currently propelling "the dark continent" into the limelight but Sauper's films take us places than Annie Liebowitz never could. I could not believe the things I was seeing and will truly never be the same after watching Sauper's films.