There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film. The first, per its subtitle, in a series of “studies of the imagination,” Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s fourth feature is a cinematic UFO perched somewhere between hard facts and dreams. It is a work that celebrates imagination as the ultimate means to emancipate ourselves; to paraphrase Don DeLillo, the only way we can escape the things that made us. 

The initial premise is simple enough to sum up, but the film itself grows stranger and larger at each detour. In the late 1970s, Pablo Escobar imported a small bloat of hippos from Africa to his finca in Colombia; shortly after the drug lord was gunned down by police in 1993, the pachyderms escaped his gigantic estate and settled in the Magdalena, Colombia’s largest river, now home to over 100 of these so-called “cocaine hippos.” De los Santos Arias turns this surreal anecdote into a springboard to reimagine the abduction and intercontinental journey of one such hippo, the titular Pepe, killed in Colombia in 2009 in a government-approved attempt to curb the species’s expansion. Told from the animal’s perspective—who narrates from the hereafter in perfect Spanish, Afrikaans and Mbukushu, depending on where along the trip the action unfolds—Pepe becomes a disquieting rumination on colonialism, its atrocities and legacy.

As was its predecessor, Cocote (2017), in which a gardener travels to his home village to avenge his father’s murder, Pepe is a chameleonic watch, toggling freely between different aspect ratios, celluloid stocks, genres and footage. It opens with an excerpt from the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Peter Potamus before cutting to a clip of Escobar’s mother mourning her son’s death on TV and finally leaving the voices of soldiers venturing inside the patrón’s mansion to carom off a black screen. This, give or take, all in the first five minutes; browsing the thoughts I scribbled down at the film’s Berlinale premiere, I’m not surprised to spot a note of existential angst: Where am I? And what am I watching?

That I’m still not sure a few months later is no indictment, but a testament to Pepe’s ability to confound and perturb. There is something so refreshing about a film that would rather revel in its enigmas than solve them for us. De los Santos Arias is not oblivious to our anthropocentric urge to decipher a creature like Pepe. But his film makes the futility and colonial connotations of that pursuit painfully apparent. In interspersing the hippo’s existential musings with evasive silences or pivoting from his POV to that of the few people around him, Pepe pushes against this need to translate the animal’s inner world in human terms, and all the more subversive and perceptive for it.  

The day after the film’s world premiere in Berlin earlier this year, where De los Santos Arias received the Best Director award, I sat with him to discuss the role imagination plays in Pepe, his bold approach to form and the connections between this and the rest of his oeuvre. 

Filmmaker: I wanted to start with the film’s subtitle. You see Pepe as the first in a series of “studies of the imagination”; I’d love to hear what role the latter plays in the film—and if this means you have a sequel in mind.

De los Santos Arias: Not a sequel, no, but there will be a second chapter in these “studies of the imagination.” I just think imagination is supremely important, all the more so today: How imagination is produced, how it functions in the realm of cinema and literature and of course, how it can be contaminated, so to speak, from a very young age. When, as children, we begin to venture into our imaginary worlds, we witness the first effects of a colonization from external forces, their symbols and images. For me, imagination takes on a very important political dimension; what I think we’re lacking in some of our political and philosophical debates today is precisely this ability to reimagine new worlds and ways of being among each other. There was a moment when Latin America cinema was very receptive to new ideas and ways of approaching narrative. I fear filmmakers might think this was a very ancient chapter in the history of our cinema, but it isn’t; it’s just that this more experiment-friendly phase was halted and thwarted by the various dictators who ruled over the continent. The generation Lucrecia Martel and Carlos Reygadas belong to, for instance… They weren’t exactly working-class filmmakers, but they came from the clase alta—the upper class. And that clase alta, one way or another, whether they were for or against them, wound up negotiating with some of those dictators. To be clear: I’m not saying that those directors supported those regimes in any way! Only that their more bourgeois backgrounds and worldviews are rooted in a very specific sensibility diametrically opposed to that of the Latin American vanguards interrupted by the political changes across the continent. I have this dream of making films that all toy with these ideas, that aren’t afraid to give in to imagination, to the fantastical. Truth be told, I think the ideal spectator for a film like Pepe would be a child. Because it’s at that early age that the subjective conquest of our people begins. 

Filmmaker: Speaking of beginnings, could you speak about the film’s genesis? When and where did the idea first come about?

De los Santos Arias: Believe it or not, a sculpture made by Camilo Restrepo, an artist from Medellín, Colombia, who rose to fame for a series of great comics on drug traffickers. He’s a lot older than me, but we studied together at CalArts. At his place back in 2017, when I was backpacking after the premiere of Cocote, I noticed this sculpture: a hippo surrounded by those little toy soldiers we used to play with as children, their tiny rifles all pointed at the animal. I asked him what it all meant, and he told me the story of Pablo Escobar’s hippo. And I swear I never do this, but I remember standing up and telling Camilo: “I’m going to make this film.” Simple as that. 

Filmmaker: What about that story intrigued you so much, specifically?

De los Santos Arias: The fact that Camilo had told me a wrong version! Apparently, he said, when a young male hippo fights with other members of his bloat, he’s expelled and left to his own devices; if he’s lucky, he’ll find and join another group. But since this particular hippo was stranded in Colombia, where there were no others of his kind, he kept hopelessly roaming the Magdalena river. And that image just broke me. Not to mention the fact that the story was set in Colombia, a country that has its own long and tragic history of armed conflicts, internally displaced people and forced migrations from Africa, when slaves would be shipped to the Caribbean prior to their final journey to North America.

In telling the story wrong, Camilo had unconsciously opened up a whole universe I was now free to explore. Of course, that’s not how things work out in the wild. When a young hippo fights with and loses to his herd’s alpha male, he is indeed expelled from the group, but that’s how the species gets to expand and thrive—which is also an interesting idea, when you think about it. That’s what you see all along the Magdalena River today: smaller groups of hippos that originated when young males split from their original bloats, took off with their female partners and formed their own little groups. 

Filmmaker: I was curious to hear more about your writing. How much different was your process here than in Cocote?

De los Santos Arias: My writing process is indissolubly tied to the locations I end up working in. There’s the actual writing, then there are the visits to the field. What I mean is all my scripts originate from a work of aesthetic research and, parallel to that, work I carry out in the territory, where I can approach the project from a perspective closer to social sciences than cinema.

Filmmaker: I can’t imagine how long and arduous that process must have been here, considering the far-flung locations, from Namibia to Colombia.

De los Santos Arias: I spent a whole year in Colombia, a little hamlet called Estación Cocorná in the department of Antioquia—the proverbial middle of nowhere. I’m very happy with what we accomplished but I must confess there were times when I just wanted to kill myself. I just left everyone and everything behind—my loved ones, my friends—to settle in this village, an area controlled by the paramilitaries to boot! It was a really, really rough journey. 

Filmmaker: Part of what I enjoyed so much about Pepe was this constant tug of war between our need to understand and “decipher” the animal, and the notion that this is a hopeless pursuit; there are things about a creature so foreign to us that we’ll never be able to see or grasp. Could you speak about that tension?

De los Santos Arias: The only way I had to try and venture into a hippo’s worldview—to grasp the psychic makeup of a being so different from me—was fiction, and the first person singular. I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, never liked following the rules, and most of the dumbest rules in cinema have often been laid out by Yankees, because theirs, to a large degree, is a dumb society. But I also think there’s something so constrictive about this obsession with the I, the individual, what Édouard Glissant referred to as the notion of the One, so prominent across Europe and her prodigal son, the US. The whole history of the West is premised on this idea of the singular hero, the savior. Same goes for cinema; shattering that perspective is nothing short of sacrilegious. If people were to read Pepe’s script there are things I know they’d balk at. Like, how could you ditch Pepe halfway through the film? If he was the protagonist, how could you deliberately abandon his storyline like that?

Filmmaker: Yet Pepe never feels more subversive than it does here, when the film deliberately pushes against those expectations. 

De los Santos Arias: Absolutely. Look, my whole being, the person I am today, is a result of my own impressions of myself and how these intersect with what other people might think of me. But once you distance yourself from this Western tradition you come to realize that you’ll never be able to truly and fully know who you are. I can never be “complete” that way. Because this other half that makes me who I am—how others see and think of me—is something I will never be able to grasp. At the same time, other people will never have full access to my own private worldview. There’s always a degree of opacity to our lives, a sense of things that remain hidden. 

Filmmaker: I’m happy you used the word opacity, because I think the cinematography in Pepe speaks to that impossibility to fully “know” another creature. Time and again, the aspect ratios change, the screen sears black or white and pauses litter the narrative.

De los Santos Arias: Commercial cinema isn’t as concerned with venturing beyond the beaten track so much as unfurling a three-act plot and turning an artwork into a marketable product. But when cinema is fully engaged with the world around it, it can achieve something stupefying: it can make the invisible visible. Scientifically and practically speaking, that’s just what happens to celluloid; it captures light, which reacts with the film’s silver crystals. But then, of course, not everything can be made visible—not everything can be represented that way. That’s why I like pauses in my films, because—beyond any intellectual or artistic motivations behind them—they give me a chance to re-organize myself and my thoughts, and they afford the same opportunity to those watching. It’s in these moments that I can traverse different worlds and jump from one to the other—traverse colors and textures and approaches and techniques and different ways to represent what I see. Those pauses always allow me to reach new languages, or maybe just return to older ones. In the case of Pepe, for some reason the process was very dichotomous, hence the black and the white, which is also a good way of thinking about colonialism and its own black-and-white distinctions. Mind you, I only just wrapped the film, and I haven’t really assimilated all the efforts I put into it. I like to work alone; of course there are moments when I’m surrounded by my crew but I spend most of the time working on my own. I edit, compose the score, work on the sound, shoot…

Filmmaker: Speaking of which—you shot Cocote with Roman Kasseroller, but teamed up with two other DOPs for Pepe: Roman Lechapelier and Camilo Soratti. I was curious about that change in personnel, and your own relationship with cinematography. 

De los Santos Arias: I come from a background in personal filmmaking, the cinema-essay, if you will. And for me the relationship between the person behind the camera, the camera itself and the subject in front of it is supremely important. I’m not particularly concerned with the figure of the director and the role they play—I think that’s an invention we’ve inherited from industrial filmmaking. I’d rather feel the camera, if that makes any sense. Pepe is a film I worked on by and large alone; when there are actors involved, of course, things change. All through the part that was shot in Namibia, for instance, I was alone, handling camera and sound and the like. But in Cocorná, with all those people and actors—that was a lot more difficult. Roman [Kasseroller] is an incredible artist; I’d love to work again with him. Roman comes from a more traditional approach; he comes from cinema, and has an incredible sensibility, especially in how he arranges the light. But in Pepe we needed something different. It was a lot more arduous; the boats we used to shoot some of the sequences in and around Cocorná were very tiny and narrow, for one thing. Everything was much more complicated. 

Filmmaker: How and where would you situate Pepe within your filmography? I’m wondering what kind of relationship do you see between this and Cocote. 

De los Santos Arias: I think Cocote taught me a lot about directing actors, and non-professionals especially. Though I must confess that making that film made me lose something: a more intimate relationship with the production of sounds and images. That, I suspect, was because I was serving as a director in the more conventional sense of the term: there was a crew I had to manage, and I wasn’t as directly involved in the actual production of the material. So, in Pepe I got to reclaim the way of working I had explored in Santa Teresa y Otras Historias (2015), and combined that with the discoveries I had made with directing actors in Cocote. Which wasn’t as easy here, because Colombian Spanish—especially the paisa dialect spoken in rural Antioquia, where people are a lot more closed—was a lot trickier to work with than Caribbean Spanish. But that’s what I did in the end; I mixed the approach to sounds and images I had developed in Santa Teresa with my work in Cocote, and I think Pepe came out much stronger from the encounter.