"Darwin's Nightmare" is an exercise in irony that probably would not have been lost on Charles Darwin himself, who by all accounts was a lucid if embittered scholar with a penchant for sardonic humor. The lessons to be culled from this documentary are so varied that it's impossible to take it all in at a single viewing; well aware of this, the Japanese distributor held a symposium and press conference to sift through the material. What emerged was a sense that this was no distant phenomenon but an issue very close to home -- as director Hubert Sauper stressed: "This is not an isolated African problem but one that mirrors the particular time we live in." As such, there is no solution. Sauper points out: "What remains is a terrible sense of discomfiture," which is probably the understatement of the year. He went on to take questions.
How did you decide on the material for this film?
I was filming a documentary on the civil war in Congo, and in the process I became friendly with the Russian pilots who were carrying fish back to Europe for restaurant and supermarket consumption. And then I found out that on the flight in, these pilots were transporting land mines, tanks and prosthetic arms and legs for the victims whose limbs were about to be blown off by those very weapons. Then I heard about the Nile perch in Lake Victoria and how the same thing could be happening there. I felt that this story had to be told.