Pepe

• Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias
• 123 min
• Dominican Republic, Namibia, Germany, France
• 2024
• Fiction

A hippo’s spirit guides us in this year’s most untamed and hallucinatory film odyssey.
When Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar died in 1993, his exotic wild pets were sent to zoos. However, his hippos escaped, reproduced, and became targets for poachers. Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias (Cocote, GFF 2018), who won the directing award at the Berlin Film Festival, approaches this true story with unconventional methods, narrated by the hippo Pepe, at the moment of his death. We hear the animal’s thoughts as the film leaps across time and continents, from Namibia to Colombia. In a breathtaking cinematic experience unlike any other, Pepe poses provocative questions about exile, violence, colonialism, the nature of existence, and the fear of the unknown.




- Niclas Goldberg

• Djur
• Experimentell
• Historia
• Hybridfilm
• Kolonialism