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How do we learn about the rest of the world? What shapes our ideas of places and things that we've never visited before? Especially places like Africa, South America, and parts of Asia, which only show up in the news if some terrible calamity has struck. And sometimes not even then. I'm afraid that most of us don't care. If something's out of sight, it's definitely out of mind. On those rare instances when a world event demands that we pay attention (the tsunami, the Rwandan genocide), we sympathize for the loss of life, maybe write a quick check, and then move on to our daily lives.

This willful isolation is encouraged by our entertainment industry. Television and movies avoid any kind of reality that might get in the way of the fantasy-fueled, advertising-driven consumerist lifestyle they're trying to promote. Check out how many Hollywood films are set in Africa (Disney movies don't count). Even the rare movie that actually takes place in Africa almost always features the travails of beautiful white people. My friend Garth tried to convince me that this fall's The Constant Gardener was worthwhile because some of it was actually shot in the slums of Kenya. The film's storyline, though, featured Africans as mere background to the spy intrigue of Ralph Fiennes and his very beautiful on-screen wife Rachel Weisz. And before you point out Hotel Rwanda, I challenge you to think of another fiction movie about Africa that genuinely focuses on African people. It's hard, isn't it?

All of which is why the surge in documentaries is so welcome. While those don't have the cachet that a $10 million narrative film might, they're becoming more and more available, both in big-city arthouses and through dvd services like Netflix. Furthermore, there has been a veritable explosion of documentaries about Africa in the last couple years. One of my favorites is Darwin's Nightmare, which screened at Facets Cinematheque earlier this year and premieres this Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a week-long run.

The documentary, directed by Hubert Sauper, focuses on the area surrounding Lake Victoria in the African country of Tanzania. The lake has been over-run by the Nile Perch, a large fresh-water fish that was accidentally introduced 50 years ago. This has created a huge supply of fish for export to Europe, which has made a few businessmen quite wealthy and provided jobs for many of the people who live around the like. But the species has decimated the eco-system, including the smaller fish that used to provide much of the food for Tanzania's population. And because Europeans can pay much more for the Nile Perch than ordinary Tanzanians, few of the people living around the lake and in the wider countryside can afford to eat what was once a staple of their lifestyle. Economists talk about globalization bringing down the price of commodities, but the opposite is often true in the Third World.

Sauper does a nice job of giving the feel of the lake towns, interviewing everyone from the owner of the fish factory to the pilots who fly the food back to Europe to the homeless boys who eke out an existence on the street. He spends much more time with the marginalized Africans than with the ecologists and economists who are often trotted out in these kinds of movies. This helps us understand how the problem has impacted the native townsfolk, though it makes it harder for us to understand the full scale of the problem. We see the particular rather than the general. But given how often economists and politicians talk about Africa and globalization in general terms, I welcome a movie that shows us how those abstractions are impacting specific people.

Darwin's Nightmare is shot in ugly-looking digital video, but the format certainly makes it easier to get the range of interviews Sauper does. A pair of scenes that focus on a group of boys is both touching and harrowing, as is a long sequence that shows how resourceful Africans use the cast-offs from the fish factories. Sauper also spends a great deal of time shooting the apparently empty planes that fly into the local airport. At first, it seems as if he's emphasizing that Europe doesn't provide anything to Africa in return for the food. But he finally gets around to the presumption that illegal arms shipments are actually flying in. That's an even more provocative argument--that Europe takes Africa's food and offers only warfare in return--and the film would've been helped if that argument had been made earlier on. Still, this is a compelling examination on the impact of globalization and a heart-felt look at an area of the world we rarely see.  

J. Robert Parks