The Dominican Republic has become the first Latin American country to announce its candidate for Best International Feature Film at the 98th edition of the Academy Awards: Pepe by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, as confirmed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of the Dominican Republic (ACCINE RD).
Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the most recent Berlin Film Festival—marking the first time a Latin American filmmaker has received the honor—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. Left to fend for themselves, these animals reproduced and became the target of government sterilizers and poachers.
The story unfolds from the perspective of a sentient hippo, Pepe, at the moment of its death. We hear the animal’s thoughts, voiced by a raspy narrator, as the film skips across time and continents, from Pepe’s native Namibia to Colombia’s Río Magdalena. Blurring nonfiction and fantasy, the film shuffles storytelling modes and cinematic textures. 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.
This is the second time de los Santos Arias represents his country at the Oscars, after his 2018 feature Cocote was selected. Since it began submitting films in 1983, the Caribbean nation has yet to receive a nomination.
