A silver bear for a talking hippopotamus

Text: Christina Iglhaut

A deep, muffled voice claiming to be that of a hippopotamus booms through the cinema auditorium at the Berlinale Palast cinema in Berlin. A voice that doesn’t understand the concept of time. A voice which, as if in a trance, tells of a historic event and only knows one thing for certain – that its owner is dead. “Pepe”, a film by Dominican dir­ector Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, is about the first and so far only wild hippopotamus to be killed in South America. The hippo, christened “Pepe” by the Colombian media, was one of three that Pablo Escobar had arranged to be transported from Southern Africa to Colombia in 1981. The notorious drug baron kept the hippos at his Hacienda Nápoles estate until he was shot and killed by US and Colom­bian special forces in 1993. When his property was searched, the animals in the water went un­noticed, allowing them to reproduce unhindered. Today, more than 100 of these “cocaine hippos” live in the river system of the Rio Magdalena.

Mr de los Santos: What fascinated you about Pepe’s story, and what made it suitable material for a film?

Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias: “I found it such an interesting story because it was the first herd of wild hippos outside the ­African continent. Pepe was driven away from the herd and ended up 500 kilometres downstream in the Rio Magdalena, where he terrified local people – until he was finally killed without ever knowing who he was or where he belonged. The story prompted me to think a lot about the historic migration between the African and American continents.”

What message did you want the film to convey?

de los Santos Arias: “I’m from the Caribbean. We are people of African and European descent, that is to say, a mixture of many ethnic backgrounds and cultures. Identity, a sense of belonging, colonialism and migration are leitmotifs that can be found throughout my filmography. This time, I had the chance to explore these topics through Pepe’s eyes. It is my first fable. These days we frequently suffer from a lack of imagination and mutual understanding, and we also fail to view things from different perspectives. That’s what I wanted to address.”

„Identity, a sense of belonging, colonialism and migration are leitmotifs that can be found throughout my filmography.“

For this film, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias won the Silver Bear for best director at this year’s Berlinale. The Berlin International Film Festival is one of the most highly regarded international competitions. The award is a milestone for the director, who was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2019. During his time in Berlin, de los Santos Arias already conducted research for his experimental film.

How did you experience your time in Berlin?

de los Santos Arias: “I have always been fascinated by countries that are culturally very distinct from my own. That’s why I didn’t want to go to Spain or Portugal but rather to Scotland or Germany so as to explore my “otherness” there. The year I spent on the Artists-in-Berlin Program was really one of the best years of my life – I wish I could do it all over again (laughs). The experimental electronic music scene in Berlin inspired me. People from all over the world come to Berlin and leave their musical mark on the city. Anyone who watches ‘Pepe’ will notice this influence and understand the importance of sound in my work. Berlin gave me the energy and self-confidence to raise my sound design to a whole new level. ‘Pepe’ is full of psychedelic music that I made myself.”

De los Santos Arias is in his ­element when he can explore new themes and embark on virgin territory. He has been passionate about experimental film ever since he studied at Edinburgh College of Art in ­Scotland in 2008 and 2009, and has achieved consider­able success in this domain: the Dominican Republic was long considered a blank spot on the global film map, but this is changing thanks to Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias. His first short film “She Said He Walks”, which revolves around emotions, already won him the renowned British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). Across his broad-ranging artistic output, however, the director has also engaged repeatedly with his home country.

“I wanted to become a musician, then a writer, then a photographer. But once I had discovered the universe of cinema, that sealed my fate.”

You have already achieved many international successes and are now an established ­director – how did you in fact end up in film?

de los Santos Arias: “As a child I had asthma. I couldn’t play outside and felt pretty isolated. So I started to watch films as a child – though not only children’s films. My father showed me many films, and later an acquaintance ran a film club. He gave me VHS cassettes with films by Carlos Saura and François Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’. I also had phases of wanting to become a musician, then a writer, then a photographer. But once I had discovered the universe of cinema, that sealed my fate.” —

Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias was born in Santo Domingo in 1985. After studying creative writing and media art at the Universidad Iberoamericana he moved to Buenos Aires in 2006 to study film. He then went to Scotland, where he specialised in experimental film at Edinburgh College of Art from 2008 to 2009. In 2009 his first short film “She Said He Walks” won a British Academy Film Award. He con­tinued his artistic training with a Master of Fine Arts in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, graduating in 2014. In 2019 he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program that enables international cultural professionals to devote themselves during a residency in Berlin to their artistic thoughts, activities and research without any pressure to produce.