Darwin's Nightmare

It's funny: sometimes you can go for years without seeing two movies about crimes being committed by the shore of an African lake, and then you'll see two in a day. One of these movies, Fernando Meireilles' "The Constant Gardener," based on a John LeCarre novel, is a gripping love story wrapped in a tale of intrigue and corporate corruption. "Darwin's Nightmare" is also a thriller, but instead of Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes, it features real people. Both films share the same moral about globalization, almost word for word. "The Constant Gardener" is great entertainment with a message; "Darwin's Nightmare" is a brutal punch to the gut.

Director Hubert Sauper, an Austrian who lives in Paris, has made an award-winning documentary that slyly suggests its themes right from the start; the tower operator at a Tanzanian airport has to kill a bee before he can clear a plane for landing. What kind of plane? A huge Russian transport that, everybody assumes, arrives empty. When it leaves, the plane will carry 500 tons of fish fillets that will feed millions all over Europe. The fish is Nile perch from Lake Victoria, the area's only natural resource. Since being introduced into the lake a few decades ago, the predatory fish has prospered—at the expense of most other life in the lake.

Around the lake, amid rotting perch carcasses and rusting hulks of crashed cargo planes, Fish Cities have sprung up, strange Interzones where a jumbled sampling of humanity ekes out a living. Indian entrepreneurs work hard to keep their perch factories up to EU standards. Tanzanian fishermen skin dive to chase the huge fish into nets (until the crocodiles get them.) Russian pilots enjoy $10 prostitutes whose husbands have died of AIDS while watchmen earn $1 a night to stand guard with poison arrows. It's a job that can get them killed—but that goes for the whores, too. After dark, the streets of Fish City teem with orphans who fight over food and use molten perch packaging as sniffing glue. With a perfect eye for the telling detail, Sauper gets us close to all of them.

But I haven't told you the worst. The shocking secrets of Fish City are more horrifying than any X-Files plot and infinitely crueler than even John LeCarre's villains. But since Sauper structured his movie as an unfolding mystery, I won't give them away here. Suffice it to say that this film left me speechless. The questions it raises are some of the most pressing of our time. Like the terrible brainchild of Naomi Klein and David Lynch, "Darwin's Nightmare" combines bizarre sights with jaw-dropping revelations, a striking cast of characters with global awareness. It's not to be missed.