Sometimes, a movie works best as an educational tool.  The movie Pepe educated me about the existence and persistence of Pablo Escobar’s hippos.  Apparently, the infamous drug lord imported a small population of African hippopotamuses to his private Colombian zoo, where they’ve since bred into an out-of-control population that’s long outlasted his reign.  And because movies also have to function as art, I learned that factoid through the confused narration of one of the original hippos’ ghost – naturally.  Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias recounts Escobar’s hippo fiasco with an international cast of German tourists, Colombian fishermen and, of course, African hippopotamuses.  As a gesture of respect to the hippos who’ve become a violent nuisance to Colombian citizens through no fault of their own, de los Santos Arias attempts to tell this story through those hippos’ voice & perspective, but the task proves impossible.  The titular Pepe narrates his small family’s travels from their home waters to the inhospitable rivers of a new land in two competing voices, neither of which he’s certain are his own.  He starts the film only convinced of two facts: he belongs in Africa, and he is already dead.  How he’s communicating his story and who, exactly, is his audience confounds the poor beast’s ghost, almost as much as Colombian fishermen were confounded by the sudden presence of hippos in their daily water routes. 

The first half of Pepe is its most artistically abstract.  We attempt to understand the world through the eyes of the already-dead hippo, much like how Jerzy Skolimowski attempts to understand the world through a donkey’s eyes in his Au hazard Balthazar modernization EO.  As a living creature, Pepe would not have been able to explain his life or his thoughts to a human audience, as he lived more on intuition than interpretation.  His knowledge of the world was passed down through “the eyes of the elders” in his hippo community and embellished by “the scratches on their old bodies.”  As the disembodied voice of a hippo’s ghost, Pepe has to learn how to tell his story to us in real time, while de los Santos Arias illustrates his life in the early 1980s through hippo-themed nature footage.  In either case, Pepe is aware of his audience.  In the 80s, his community is gawked at by German tourists on safari, who point cameras at the small herd.  In the 2020s, de los Santos Arias’s camera repeats the offense among Pepe’s Colombian descendants, while his hippo-ghost narrator sounds vaguely annoyed by having been awakened from death to explain his transportation to and escape from Pablo Escobar’s vanity zoo.  Both the filmmaker and the hippo blame Escobar for Pepe’s displacement and resulting death, not the freaked-out fishermen who can’t safely share the waters with the beast.  The crime against Pepe and his family is committed long before we meet his ghost, and all that’s left is grim aftermath.

Pepe gradually becomes more conventional as a narrative feature in its second half, when the fallout of the hippos’ displacement is dramatized among The Two-Legged who resolve to hunt them for the sake of human safety.  Even so, de los Santos Arias maintains a playful sense of experimentation throughout, especially in how he incorporates Ed Woodian nature footage into the more traditional drama of the fishermen’s struggles to live among Escobar’s hippos.  It’s a necessary indulgence to prevent direct, dangerous contact between the film’s human actors and its wild animals, but it also goes a long way to contextualize the story as an on-going environmental crisis.  The amount of digital hippo footage de los Santos Arias works into the visual texture of the film’s otherwise vintage 80s aesthetic makes it apparent just how easy it is to encounter hippos in modern Colombia.  They’re seemingly just as easy to film as an alligator in a Louisiana swamp, which have been present here for millions of years instead of dozens.  That mixed-media approach to the live hippo footage extends to other intrusions on Pepe’s narrative elsewhere, including real-life news reportage of Pablo Escobar’s death and a seemingly fabricated children’s cartoon starring a talking hippo character also named Pepe.  The most fascinating stretches of the film are the ones that gawk at the violent majesty of hippos in the wild – napping, pissing, shitting, being pecked at by small birds.  De los Santos Arias’s most ambitious experiment within that gawking is his attempt to give that violent majesty a voice of its own, sincerely wrestling with how impossible it is to do right by the modern beasts who’ve been so historically wronged.

-Brandon Ledet