In the 1980s, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar imported four hippopotamuses for a personal menagerie to entertain and impress guests at his lavish estate, Hacienda Nápoles. While many of the animals either perished or were transferred to zoos after his death in 1993, the hippopotamuses survived and reproduced in the surrounding rivers, becoming an invasive species that threatened ecosystems and local fishing villages.

Based on real events, this enigmatic, feature film from Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias centers on Pepe, a sentient hippopotamus reflecting upon his life’s journey from Namibia to Colombia in a raspy, unconventional, meditative voiceover. "Pepe" was the name given by the Colombian press to an actual hippopotamus killed in 2009 by a hunting party aiming to stop Escobar’s hippos from infiltrating the nearby rivers.

As it shifts between Pepe’s existential reflections and the perspectives of local villagers, the film also playfully alternates between realism and fantasy — posing provocative questions about displacement, trauma, and the nature of being.

Filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias will join in-person for a conversation after the screening.

Pepe won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2024 Berlinale International Film Festival and will have its U.S. Premiere at the New York Film Festival on Saturday, October 5.

In Afrikaans, German, Spanish, and Mbukushu with English subtitles

The film screens as part of "Cine Con Cultura." Courtesy of the filmmaker and producers Monte y Culebra, Santo Domingo; 4a4 Productions, France; Pandora Films, Germany; and Joe’s Vision, Namibia.

About the filmmaker
Dominican filmmaker Nelson de los Santos Arias was born in Santo Domingo, where he also studied creative writing and media art at the Universidad Iberoamericana (UNIBE). He then studied cinema at Universidad del cine in Buenos Aires, Edinburgh College of Art, and received his MFA Film & Video at CalArts in 2014. His first short film SheSaid HeWalks was awarded a 2009 Scottish BAFTA. His first documentary, The Carriage, was included in the major Latin America art exhibition in the US at the Guggenheim Museum. His thesis from Calarts, Santa Teresa y Otras Historias, premiered at FidMarseille winning the Prix Georges De Beauregard. His film Cocote was released at Locarno winning the Golden Leopard in the Signs of Life category. He was a beneficiary of the DAAD where he started to develop his new film Pepe. It premiered in the 74th Edition of the Berlin International Festival, winning the Silver Bear for Best Director.

A conversation among Sumeet Samos, Sarita Pariyar, and Prachi Patankar

Sumeet Samos is a research scholar, writer, rapper, and anti-caste activist from India.

Sarita Pariyar is a Fulbright Graduate Fellow at Cornell University. She is a writer, activist, and founder of Just Futures Pahal in Nepal.

Prachi Patankar is an anti-caste and feminist writer and activist. She works at the Foundation for a Just Society.

A community book read with Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier and winner of the 2024 Benda Prize.

Register here for the Zoom link. Participants are expected to have read the book.

Urban Ecologies on the Edge offers an innovative and theoretically groundbreaking perspective on the production and maintenance of new resource frontiers on the edge of a rapidly expanding city in the Global South. Using the case study of Laguna Lake in Metro Manila, Saguin demonstrates with methodological versatility the dynamic relationship between economic development and environmental management as diverse stakeholders attempt to access and control commodity flows within chains of urban provisioning. Through meticulous storytelling, the book artfully traces the intertwined socioecologies of floods, food, fish, fisherfolk, and infrastructures. With precision and clarity, it reveals how human and nonhuman actors contend for diverse and increasingly exhausted resources, while confronting risk and precarity that manifest in conflicting visions of the future sustainability of the lake and surrounding city.

A webinar featuring Vina A. Lanzona, Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang, and Lila Ramos Shahani, moderated by Christine Balance and organized by the Southeast Asia Digital Library.

Vina A. Lanzona: "Origins and Vision of the Martial Law Library: Navigating the Difficult Philippine Past"

Associate Professor in History and former director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

In this talk, Vina Lanzona will share the beginnings of the idea of a digital library of Martial Law materials, as well as the vision of the project. She will outline the major challenges as well accomplishments of this collaborative project that spans across countries, oceans and continents. Central to her presentation is to show how to navigate the website, taking all of us into a unique journey into this painful and controversial period in Philippine history.

Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang: “Marcosian propaganda as fascist propaganda: Myth-making and historical distortions in the 21st century”

Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman

In this talk, Jio Guiang argues that Marcosian propaganda is a form of fascist propaganda that utilizes networked disinformation as a means to manipulate public discourse and generate mass support. In recent years, social media platforms have become conduits for political myth-making and historical distortions that ultimately subscribe to the playbook of “fascist propaganda” in the Philippines. Thus, this presentation will show examples of social media materials so as to reveal how some forces within the Philippine political establishment have deployed this type of propaganda to systematically weaponize disinformation and gain public support—a tactic that had been proven effective for the Rodrigo Duterte and the Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. regimes.

Lila Ramos Shahani: "Grieving the ungrievable: Trauma and Memory during Martial Law"

Expert Member of two International Scientific Committees of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), where she specializes in the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (ICIP) and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICICH)

If memorials can be described as the performance of memory, which stories do they privilege, and which do they eclipse or deliberately erase altogether? Memorials (monuments, historical markers, art, texts) can also be seen as the materialization of certain stories. But memorialization paradoxically preserves, even as it represses, memory itself. It is this dialectical relationship between memory and memorialization, one that is unending and open-ended, that I seek to unpack. I look at the relationship between grieving and trauma -- how the two are inseparable yet unresolvable -- in relation to narratives of torture by survivors of Martial Law in the Philippines. Following Judith Butler’s notion of “grievability,” I ask: whose lives (and stories) have been deemed to be grievable, whose have not, and how have these calibrations influenced the way Martial Law has been commemorated? Based on first-hand interviews with survivors and numerous affidavits, I examine the relative absence of memorialization of Filipino Muslims (“Moros”), particularly women, whenever the brutal record of the Marcos regime is recalled.

The 2024 MexicanEast conference, held at Cornell University from September 20-21, 2024, brings scholars together to discuss transit through the lens of Mexican cultural studies. We welcome discussion about migration, movement, transition, trade, and trans and queer issues, as well as any other meaningful engagement with the topic of transit.