Film Festival #2: The Darker Side Of Fish

Somehow, a group managed to hold an Accra Environmental Film Festival (in a city known more for open sewers, smoke-billowing tro-tros and random burning piles of trash) and was showing movies all week to raise awareness, which resident flower-child Meghan would definitely approve of (if she wasn't in Mali with Lisa. Sorry-o!)

I caught the final night of the festival which featured Miss Ghana promoting idodated salt, a British director's short documentary on a Mauritanian desert board game called Sands of Enigma: Seig and a surreal, award-winning Senegalese short film called Petite Lumière about a little girl in a dreamworld.

The main attraction that evening was Darwin's Nightmare, a haunting film about a town on Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Some half-century ago, someone thought it would be a good idea to dump a few Nile Perch into the lake. However, they grew big and ate all of the native fish. The environmental effects are disastrous, but the economic benefits have already been realized: caught by fishermen, they are sent to a processing factory and shipped to Europe by planes that come in empty every day and leave with the fish.

The film lets the people speak for themselves and doesn't take positions, rather letting the viewer come to his or her own conclusions. It shows the hardships of the fishermen, the villagers, the town's streetchildren, the prostitutes for the pilots - but it also sheds light on the lives of the factory owners and the pilots themselves. It shows the worst victims of the global capitalist system, but doesn't demonize the people.

The movie is raw and jarring. And it isn't afraid to ask scary questions: where do the streetchildren go at night? What happens to the prostitutes? What happens to the fish, for that matter? And are the planes really coming back empty, or is it much more sinister than that?

I may be sounding like a paid movie critic, but if you get a chance to see this, please do, because it will open up your mind and show you one of the darkest sides of Africa.