‘How do I know these words?’: philosophical cocaine hippo is star of Berlin film festival
Some facts about Pepe are certain. He was heavy even for his thick-set genus, reported to have weighed between four and five tonnes. With a land speed of up to 22 mph and ivory stakes protruding from those pink gums at random angles, he was a forceful reminder that his species is one of the deadliest on the planet, causing an estimated 500 human deaths per year.
Native to sub-Saharan Africa but born in Colombian cocaine king Pablo Escobar’s private menagerie and shot in its vicinity after escaping from captivity in 2009, Pepe the unhappy hippo was also undisputedly and tragically out of place.
The question on everyone’s lips at this week’s Berlin film festival, however, is what Pepe means. Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’ buzzy arthouse film of the same name, which is one of 20 films competing for the Golden Bear in the festival’s coveted main competition, tells the story of Escobar’s famed pets from the beast’s point of view. In growling voiceovers, interspersed with grunts and wheezing groans, Pepe soliloquises about his fate.
But the creature’s symbolic significance is elusive. Is the hippo a bad omen, whose attacks on humans are harbingers of personal betrayals, as a Namibian guide explains the animal’s mythical meaning to a group of European safari tourists? Is Pepe the reincarnation of “the boss”, evading his hunters in the undergrowth of the Magdalena Valley like his former owner? Escobar, the most wanted drug lord of the 1980s, died in a shoot-out in 1993. But his animals, like his legacy of terror, outlived him.
Are Colombia’s cocaine hippos ciphers for migratory movements in an ever more globalised world? Escobar originally brought three hippos to his Hacienda Nápoles estate from Africa in 1981, but the animals adapted to their new habitat and by November last year the South American state’s hippo population had grown to approximately 170. Speaking at a press conference after the film’s premiere on Tuesday morning, De Los Santos Arias likened Pepe to the cimarrons – African slaves who abandoned their Spanish masters in mid-16th century and hid in the mountains of Panama.
Is Pepe’s story also the story of colonialism? The film, which its director developed while participating in a German-state-funded Berlin residency, identifies Pepe’s country of origin as Namibia, a former German colony, and the hunter who was hired by the Colombian state to track down and shoot the animal had the same nationality.
“In the film, there is a philosophical image, which is the circularity of coloniality,” De Los Santos Arias said. “How do we escape from there? Perhaps only in death.”
Or is Pepe a philosophical meditation on physicality and language, an attempt to think about the world hippopotamically? The animal’s voiceover dramatises his family’s feuds and battles in epic terms, in Spanish, Afrikaans and Mbukushu, a language native to modern-day Namibia. How he has acquired these human tongues, he does not know: “How do I know these words? How do I know what a word is?”
At a festival where organisers and directors have felt the pressure to state their stances on geopolitical events in unequivocal terms, Pepe makes the case that films are sometimes allowed to be several things at once. Even though De los Santos Arias said he had never read Moby-Dick, he proposed that his cocaine hippo had a white whale-ish quality, seizing the imagination of Magdalena River fishers and cinemagoers alike, without ever revealing its true meaning.
“Hippos and whales have the same ancestors,” he said. Both mammals have oil-producing skin glands on their hairless skin, and both communicate via underwater vocalisations. “When you spend time with hippos, you start seeing the whale-ishness of them.”