Film at Lincoln Center announced this morning the main slate for the 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival, which includes Pepe, the latest film by Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos, as the only Latin American entry in the 32-film slate.
Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the last edition of the Berlin Film Festival—marking the first time for a Latin American filmmaker—Pepe takes a fascinating, highly unorthodox approach to the strange but true tale of the hippopotamuses that escaped from the menagerie of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar after his death in 1993. These wild animals fended for themselves, reproducing and becoming the target of government sterilizers and poachers.
The story is told from the perspective of a sentient hippo, Pepe, at the moment of its death. We hear the animal’s thoughts as they’re spoken aloud by a raspy narrator, as the film skips across time and continents, from Pepe’s home country of Namibia to the Rio Magdalena in Colombia, where Pepe has escaped. The film shuffles modes of storytelling and alternates between nonfiction and fantasy. In its sympathetic inquiry and aesthetic muscularity, Pepe poses provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on Earth and the nature of being.
The 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival will take place from September 27 to October 14 at Lincoln Center and in four partner venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), The Bronx Museum (Bronx), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens).
