Pepe

Pepe tells his story from the afterlife. His parents came from Africa and he spent his childhood in Hacienda Nápoles, drug lord Pablo Escobar’s private zoo. At some point, he escaped and lived in the jungle with his peers, until he was killed by Colombian soldiers under the command of a foreigner who was an expert in annihilating similar specimens. Pepe is bilingual. Pepe is a hippopotamus. The importance of the film’s original subtitle cannot be ignored here, which refers to the film as “a study of the imagination”, because filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias is irreverent enough to structure his narrative like a fractal, deconstructing commonplaces of colonialism and patriarchy while making poetic decisions usually only permitted for European filmmakers. Emancipating imagination from the codes of international style is not easy; there are thus no magical realist tropes here, but rather brave experiments in sound and editing. The filmmaker plays and invents, cinematically appropriating the panoramic views that drones permit. He knows very well that sequence shots are most appropriate for moving through space, generating undeniable optical pleasure along the way. (Roger Koza)

On the 19th of October in the presence of Christoph Friedel (co-producer).

NELSON CARLOS DE LOS SANTOS ARIAS: LE DERNIER DES BONBONS (2011, K), PARECES UNA CARRETA DE ESAS QUE NO LA PARA NI LO’ BUEYE (2013), LULLABIES (2014, K), SANTA TERESA Y OTRAS HISTORIAS (2015), COCOTE (2017)