Darwin's Nightmare

Emil is an elderly circus director. His pleasant and all-too-frequent duty is to greet people from every village in the land. Again and again the tired old fighter refuses to stop and wonder whether it is worthwhile - though this is the question foremost in his mind.

Along an overgrown rail track south of the Zairean town Kisangani, a UN expedition together with a handful of journalists discover “lost” refugees. They are eighty thousand Hutus from far away Rwanda, the last survivors of three years of hunger and armed persecution that transpired throughout the vast Congo basin. The Hutu-refugees leave the forest, gathering in two gigantic camps. Hundreds of refugees die every day from diseases and malnutrition The Rwandans are promised repatriation with airplanes out of Kisangani. The film traces those refugees into the heart of the rainforest, and the hopeless attempts to help them.. But only four weeks later, the unprotected UN-camps are again attacked by machine-gun fire, deliberately massacred by factions of the rebel army (AFDL) of today’s Democratic Republic Congo. Eighty thousand men, women and children disappear once again back into the jungle. (jedensvet.cz)

As war-ravaged South Sudan claims independence from North Sudan and its brutal President, Omar al-Bashir, a tiny, homemade prop plane wings in from France. It is piloted by eagle-eyed documentarian Hubert Sauper, who is mining for stories in a land trapped in the past but careening toward an apocalyptic future.

Cuba is well known as a so-called time capsule. The place where the New World was discovered has become both a romantic vision and a warning. With ongoing global cultural and financial upheavals, large parts of the world could face a similar kind of existence.