DIRECTOR: Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias
STARRING: Jhon Narvaez, Jorge Puntillon Garcia, Sor Maria Rios
RUNNING TIME: 2 hrs 2 minutes
LANGUAGE: Spanish, Afrikaans, German
PLOT: A voice speaks: the voice of a hippopotamus who does not grasp the flow of time. Pepe, the first and last hippo killed in the Americas, recounts his story with the raw, pulsating orality of the people who remember him.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Medellin, Colombia
To check out all previous submissions for Dominican Republic, click HERE.
STARRING: Jhon Narvaez, Jorge Puntillon Garcia, Sor Maria Rios
RUNNING TIME: 2 hrs 2 minutes
LANGUAGE: Spanish, Afrikaans, German
PLOT: A voice speaks: the voice of a hippopotamus who does not grasp the flow of time. Pepe, the first and last hippo killed in the Americas, recounts his story with the raw, pulsating orality of the people who remember him.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Medellin, Colombia
To check out all previous submissions for Dominican Republic, click HERE.
FILM REVIEW:
(This review contains spoilers.)
“Those who brought me marked my fate and that of many other animals."
Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’s Pepe is an astonishing cinematic experiment, a metaphysical odyssey told through the voice of a dead hippopotamus. Loosely inspired by the true story of one of Pablo Escobar’s infamous imported hippos, the film reimagines the creature’s life and death through fragments of memory, myth, and colonial residue. Shot across the landscapes of Colombia and Namibia, Pepe collapses time and geography into a hallucinatory continuum where the personal, historical, and cosmic coexist. The result is not just a film about a hippo, but about the strange ways stories migrate, mutate, and outlive those who first told them.
Arias constructs his film like an oral poem, where language becomes rhythm rather than explanation. The titular narrator’s voice, calm, playful, and strangely profound, floats over images of rivers, swamps, and human rituals, weaving together the colonial history that brought African animals to Latin America with the absurdity of their survival long after their master’s empire fell. The film’s elliptical editing and use of voiceover blur distinctions between documentary and fable, creating an experience that feels both ancient and new.
Pepe embraces the contradictions of its subject. The film alternates between lush, naturalistic cinematography and abstract compositions that border on the cosmic, suggesting that this animal’s consciousness stretches beyond life and death. The deliberate pacing demands patience, but Arias rewards it with moments of startling transcendence, a reminder that cinema, like oral storytelling, thrives on rhythm and breath. Every frame feels steeped in metaphor, from the shimmering reflections on water to the ghostly sounds of unseen humans, echoing the tension between domination and disappearance.
Pepe is a meditation on displacement, not only of species but of memory, history, and power. Through the eyes (and voice) of a creature who never understood time, Arias dismantles the human-centered narrative of history and invites us to reconsider our place within it. The film’s main point lies in this radical reorientation: that life, even in its most absurd or tragic forms, carries an echo that defies erasure. Pepe reminds us that stories, like ghosts, never truly die, they just find new rivers to swim in.
(This review contains spoilers.)
“Those who brought me marked my fate and that of many other animals."
Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’s Pepe is an astonishing cinematic experiment, a metaphysical odyssey told through the voice of a dead hippopotamus. Loosely inspired by the true story of one of Pablo Escobar’s infamous imported hippos, the film reimagines the creature’s life and death through fragments of memory, myth, and colonial residue. Shot across the landscapes of Colombia and Namibia, Pepe collapses time and geography into a hallucinatory continuum where the personal, historical, and cosmic coexist. The result is not just a film about a hippo, but about the strange ways stories migrate, mutate, and outlive those who first told them.
Arias constructs his film like an oral poem, where language becomes rhythm rather than explanation. The titular narrator’s voice, calm, playful, and strangely profound, floats over images of rivers, swamps, and human rituals, weaving together the colonial history that brought African animals to Latin America with the absurdity of their survival long after their master’s empire fell. The film’s elliptical editing and use of voiceover blur distinctions between documentary and fable, creating an experience that feels both ancient and new.
Pepe embraces the contradictions of its subject. The film alternates between lush, naturalistic cinematography and abstract compositions that border on the cosmic, suggesting that this animal’s consciousness stretches beyond life and death. The deliberate pacing demands patience, but Arias rewards it with moments of startling transcendence, a reminder that cinema, like oral storytelling, thrives on rhythm and breath. Every frame feels steeped in metaphor, from the shimmering reflections on water to the ghostly sounds of unseen humans, echoing the tension between domination and disappearance.
Pepe is a meditation on displacement, not only of species but of memory, history, and power. Through the eyes (and voice) of a creature who never understood time, Arias dismantles the human-centered narrative of history and invites us to reconsider our place within it. The film’s main point lies in this radical reorientation: that life, even in its most absurd or tragic forms, carries an echo that defies erasure. Pepe reminds us that stories, like ghosts, never truly die, they just find new rivers to swim in.
