Pepe

The strange and tragic tale of Pepe, the late ‘cocaine hippo’ once owned by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar – as narrated by the ghost of the beast himself.

After Escobar’s death in 1993, many of his menagerie of exotic animals were left to wander. In 2009, one such escapee, a hippopotamus nicknamed ‘Pepe’, was gunned down by German hunters; as the first and only hippo to have been killed in the Americas, he fast became a local media sensation. That was the last anyone heard of (or from) Pepe – until now.

In this amusingly existential, wondrously off-kilter odyssey, Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias imagines Pepe having acquired consciousness at the point of death, and lets the late hippo recount his story in his own disembodied words. Variously speaking Spanish, Afrikaans and the Namibian dialect Mbukushu, Pepe – who is startled by his sentience and has little sense of time – describes his unlikely journey from Africa to Latin America, a tale that takes in everything from colonisation to conservatism to the drug war. Pepe is a film quite unlike any you’ll see this year.

“Wildly original … A film with a gleefully wanton approach to form, style and story in which no directorial decision is predictable.” – Screen Daily