Pepe

In the early 1980s, at the height of his activities as the leader of the Medellín cartel, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar decided to create a private zoo within the grounds of his vast estate, known as Hacienda Nápoles. He researched the types of fauna best adapted to the region’s climate and illegally imported a wide range of exotic species: elephants, zebras, dromedaries, rhinoceroses, flamingos, and even a pair of very rare black parrots. Home to more than 1,200 animals roaming freely, Escobar’s zoo was open to the public for several years — until a brutal war between rival cartels plunged Colombia into one of the most violent periods in its history.

Among the animals acquired by Escobar were four hippos. Unlike the giraffes, which never managed to adapt, the hippos thrived in the subtropical climate of northwestern Colombia. In the absence of natural predators, their numbers steadily increased, transforming a handful of exotic specimens into what is now considered an invasive species. According to official estimates, by 2023 around 168 individuals were living in the Magdalena River valley — the longest river in Colombia. This is the only wild hippopotamus population outside Africa. Pepe, by Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, evokes the simultaneously fantastical and tragic fate of one of these animals. Told in the first person by the hippo himself, Pepe’s story takes on the tone of a mythological account — not only because, as in so many fables, an animal speaks, but because his journey, from life and capture in Namibia to his solitary exile and death near Estación Cocorná, carries the evocative power of myth. Combining 16mm footage, animated segments (including excerpts from Hanna-Barbera’s Peter Potamus series), archival material related to Escobar’s death, amateur recordings documenting the real presence of hippos in the Magdalena River, as well as drone and thermal camera images, the very form of the film — shifting between color and black-and-white — reflects the multiplicity of sources from which myths are made.

Inspired by astonishing real events (Escobar’s hippos are now part of his legend), Pepe chooses speculative fiction over factual accuracy. A solitary and aggressive hippo named Pepe did in fact exist — his pursuit by authorities echoed, for many Colombians, the real manhunt waged against Escobar by the militia known as “Los Pepes” (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar) during the years of narco warfare. His eventual capture and death shocked the country — but that is not the film’s concern. The image of a creature violently uprooted from its native land, transported from Africa to the Americas for reasons it will never comprehend, forced into aggression in order to survive, and regarded as a monster by those inherently incapable of accepting it, lends itself to an allegorical reflection on the history of colonialism in the Global South. The choice to grant speech to the hippo — or rather, to his spirit, since Pepe’s voice reaches us as a ghostly murmur from beyond — is, in this sense, a central narrative strategy. To the reductive and exclusionary anthropocentrism of modern colonial rationality, which condemns the animal to an unbridgeable otherness, Los Santos Arias opposes a playful animism, epitomized in the film’s final image. That Pepe’s spirit speaks fluently in three languages — Mbukushu, from his native Namibia; Afrikaans; and Colombian Spanish — is perfectly coherent: haunted by a coloniality that stubbornly persists, his myth must, by necessity, be polyglot.

Following a loosely chronological arc — from Pepe’s childhood to his death — Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’s film was partially shot with non-professional actors in the town of Puerto Triunfo, in the Estación Cocorná region. Pepe’s story is intertwined with a broader reflection on the figure of the dominant male and the ways in which the colonization of subjectivities sustains the systems of violence and exclusion evoked in the film. The discreet yet meaningful presence of several children in Pepe reminds us that this colonization takes root, first and foremost, through the imagination — through our capacity to envision a world without hierarchies or inequalities, even between humans and animals. For Los Santos Arias, cinema’s power lies precisely in its ability to liberate the imagination. It is that faculty — fundamentally resistant to formal and narrative convention — that Pepe seeks to affirm and celebrate.