Pepe

Part nature doc (or fiction?), part monster film and ethnographic culture locale portrait, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias' Pepe is an unseen hybrid with the key character being a hippopotamus philosophising in Afrikaans, Spanish and Mbukushu who, due to one of Pablo Escobar's many excesses, makes Colombian waters unsafe. In the 1980s, the notorious drug lord imported wild hippos from Botswana for his private zoo, but some of them found their way into the jungle after his death. From this intriguing footnote in Colombian history, Arias chisels a semi-imaginary tale of fate that offers a refreshing take on colonialism and displacement. Pepe, a descendant of Escobar's "cocaine hippos", traces his origins in a deep voice flanked by subplots about German tourists and a fisherman accused of drunken lies when he recounts his encounter with the beast to his wife.