I watched two contrasting movies this week. One, V for Vendetta was a big budget Hollywood movie dealing with as much of you know a futuristic London in the grip of the type of government that Dubaya probably has wet dreams about. The other movie was two guys and a camera wandering around Tanzania shooting Darwin’s Nightmare. The subject matter for this equally apocalyptic film is both the ecological destruction wrought on the biological diversity of Lake Victoria when the Nile Perch were introduced and the social destruction the resultant trade in the Perch has caused.
 
V for Vendetta was entertaining, but simplistic in its moral messages. Blow up a couple of buildings and everything will go right. I can’t be bothered going too deep into its typical Hollywood treatment of social change but there was an interesting moment for me in the movie. That came when the little girl with the Guy Fawkes mask was shot by the secret police. Who should be responsible for that? I reckon the vast majority of the people who watched it as I was would be immediately would be pissed off at the policeman who shot her. After awhile though I realized that V effectively martyred that little girl. He played the system and put innocents in danger to ensure a public reaction and uprising against the system. He was equally responsible for that girl’s death as the policemen, but the film skirted over the issue.

Anyways enough of that, the next movie I watched, Darwin’s Nightmare was nominated for best Documentary in 2005. It was a profoundly disturbing film, watching it I could feel my soul whither. We know that things go on in our countries and in Africa that cause immense suffering and this film brings it right into your face. There is no seminal moment of tragedy in the movie but there are moments where your blood just boils, a Russian in a bar patronizing an African prostitute with a beautiful voice (she is later interviewed about her desire to go to computer training and then before the movie wraps up she is killed by an Australian client), children fighting over a pot of boiled rice, pre-teen boys smoking and sniffing glue on the streets and many others.

One of the most horrendous sequences showed lovely perch fillets being flown to Europe for sale, while the heads and fish refuse are sold to the ‘common people.’ These are then ‘processed’ in fish head farms covered in maggots and the stench of ammonia gas before being fried and sold around Tanzania. To add insult to irony Tanzania is in the middle of a famine and people are too poor to buy whatever is in the markets. An added dimension to the farce of this dichotomy is a bunch of EU officials giving a press conference where they praise the state, the ‘hygienic’ conditions and the successes of the Tanzanian fisheries. As if that was not enough it turns out the largely Russian planes that come to take the fish out of Tanzania don’t come empty, they come with guns to fuel Africa’s wars.

The perversity of the system that is portrayed in the movie is horrendous. It also brought home that while colonialism, slavery, institutionalized racism might have officially ended a few decades ago they are still very much alive. While Europeans buy their nice fish fillets from a country where people starve or eat maggot-ridden leftovers and a small elite enjoy the spoils.

This kind of movie elucidates why each and everyone of us has to question the costs of how we live, where what we eat comes from, what toils and innocents our comfortable lives are built on, not buy something from a questionable company spend that extra money on fair-trade, just be aware of the real costs of our existence. Just watch this movie and come to realize the reality of the world today.