About putting your foot down - Darwin's Nightmare

Ioana Satmari • 3/7/2025

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a documentary in its natural style and setting: you take a camera and capture a rarely seen subject. And here it is, another film where the camera is right in your face, pushing you to bare your soul. Darwin’s Nightmare, directed by Hubert Sauper, is a semi-talking head documentary shot in the early 2000s, in the villages around Lake Victoria, Tanzania.

The main plot, if we’re generous enough to say it has one, is about evoking emotions through cruelty. It plays on the gratitude we feel as people from different parts of the world, as we look from a different social, economic, and political status at these poor people and what they’re going through. While the perspective is valid, the way it appeals to our emotions is rather sneaky. This style isn’t isolated; most of Sauper’s documentaries follow a similar approach. Besides how it treats the viewers and the subjects, the film lacks artistic finesse. By the second hour, it loses both its pace and its subject, turning into the type of documentary you could easily find on National Geographic after 10 PM. It spreads itself thin, trying to gather as many exhausting and heavy stories as possible.

It starts with the pretense of showing us the situation of fishermen in the villages surrounding Lake Victoria. It interviews people from various social layers, letting them tell their stories: factory workers, their boss, fishermen, sex workers, and Eastern European pilots who export the fish. There’s a strong emphasis on the contrast between Europe and Africa, put more bluntly, between the “developed” and the “primitive.” At times, it feels propagandistic, like a threat: “See what could happen to you if you don’t behave.” With too many close-up shots of the workers’ tired faces, it feels as though it’s trying too hard and ends up intrusive. It becomes overly involved in maintaining the idea of a professional, objective, informative documentary.

However, there are a few close-up shots that create more powerful images than the street brutality or the crudeness of the people. In the rush to be productive and streamline the process of moving the large fish, workers use their fingers as hooks in the fishes’ eye sockets. I saw this as a hidden contrast, a comparison between those who came to document how things work in this corner of the world and the locals who comply with their visitors. It’s once again a comparison between worlds, between North and South or West and East. It’s all about how things could have been better, no matter how good the intentions were in creating this documentary.

The 2000s were still about conquering and putting your foot down, something that resonates strongly in this documentary as well. Stretched too long, slightly propagandistic, and straying from ethical boundaries, Darwin’s Nightmare is a late expression of power in an apparently harmless way: “We’re just making a documentary”.