Pepe (Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias, 2024)

I’ve never seen anything quite like Pepe, the sophomore feature from Dominican director Carlos De Los Santos Arias. The punchy hook is that film is narrated from the perspective of a talking hippo. More specifically, Pepe was once the property of Pablo Escobar as a member of his personal zoo in Hacienda Nopales. In the aftermath of Escobar’s death, Pepe escaped into the Magdalena river as one of the first members of what’s now a thriving invasive population in Colombia. Pepe is no Balthazar, or even an Eo. Instead, Arias uses this hippo’s fragmented identity as a way into a myriad of sociopolitical realities. Is Pepe a nature documentary, political satire, ethnographic docu-fiction, monster film, found footage film, or political thriller? The answer is yes,. Arias wields genre signifiers to political ends, with each interwoven form of identification and perspective revealing new nodes in this expansive graph of colonial fallout.

Arias’ elegant political filmmaking is on display from the very beginning. Take a stretch near the opening of the film, which follows the hippo’s passage to the Americas. Opening on an extended zoom towards a group of hippos, we hear the first instance of Pepe’s voice, a gruff, layered baritone prone to confusion and jokes. Before we know it, we’re whisked away to a satirical German Safari, where tourists snap photos from the safety of a balcony (an image later mirrored in Hacienda Nopales). Arias then reverse shots to camera trap footage, implicitly skewering a specific sort of nature documentary. The whole film proceeds in this fashion, creating dense connections on almost a shot to shot basis, alternating film stocks, overlaying fiction and documentary, seamlessly transitioning between genres, without ever straining for profundity.

Pepe is way more than an academic exercise. Arias is aware of the silliness of the premise, and grants the narration a self-deprecating, avuncular quality. Pepe frequently breaks out into deep guffaws and discusses historically-accurate herd politics, which eventually leads to his exile. Arias also has a lot of fun when dealing with humanity’s contact with Pepe outside of the fenced off realm of the zoo. Even in just a few minutes of footage, Arias is able to extract the generic pleasures of watching, for example, two of Escobar’s henchmen fearing for their lives as they transport the mysterious beast back to their boss. Later, as Pepe begins to terrorize local fishing communities, Arias shoots the fishermen’s encounters with the strange monster lurking in the river from the hippo’s perspective, as if he were a B-movie creature. It should also be noted that Pepe has ridiculously beautiful nature photography, with footage of hippos so poetic that I’m still not sure how they were captured.

Ultimately it’s Pepe’s improbable cohesion, which makes Pepe’s disparate threads feel naturally inextricable, that’s the greatest triumph. Pepe is an irreducible symbol, a character that means something different in every period and context. He was also a living creature, a tragic figure whose displacement

Pepe is available to stream on Mubi