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‘How do I know these words?’: philosophical cocaine hippo is star of Berlin film festival

Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s docudrama Pepe, about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s megaherbivore, gives the ill-fated creature its own voice

Speaking at a press conference after the film’s premiere on Tuesday morning, De Los Santos Arias likened Pepe to the cimarrons – African slaves who abandoned their Spanish masters in mid-16th century and hid in the mountains of Panama. The film, which its director developed while participating in a German-state-funded Berlin residency, identifies Pepe’s country of origin as Namibia, a former German colony, and the hunter who was hired by the Colombian state to track down and shoot the animal had the same nationality. Even though De los Santos Arias said he had never read Moby-Dick, he proposed that his cocaine hippo had a white whale-ish quality, seizing the imagination of Magdalena River fishers and cinemagoers alike, without ever revealing its true meaning.

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