Pepe

Director: Nelson Carlos De los Santos Arias

2024 / 122min / DCP

Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, de los Santos Arias’s stylistically eclectic, utterly uncategorizable, and occasionally haunting hybrid film was inspired by the true story of an African hippopotamus imported to Colombia to live in the private zoo of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar at his Hacienda Nápoles estate, later hunted down and killed after the beast escaped into the wilds of the Rio Magdalena. The decision to have the pachyderm, nicknamed “Pepe,” narrate his story from beyond the grave is not the least eccentric aspect of this film of freewheeling digressions and mosaiced storytelling, in which hairpin narrative turns and moments of breathtaking beauty come fast and furious.