De Los Santos Arias’ highly ambitious latest feature playfully reimagines the life of the titular hippopotamus, brought from southern Africa to Colombia in the late 1970s by infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. Pitched somewhere between the ethnographic and the fantastic, this speculative fiction is told from the perspective of Pepe himself, who narrates his transatlantic journey in a kind of existential bemusement, commenting on the absurdity of the situation and his eventual death at the hands of local authorities with a sense of wizened omniscience. Skillfully expanding on his montage-based approach to narrative, de Los Santos Arias combines fictional passages—largely centered on a pair of fishermen frustrated by the arrival of the pachyderms to the Magdalena River Valley—with documentary footage of hippos still living in the region, sequences of found audio and news footage related to the murders of both Pepe and Pablo Escobar, and, most cleverly, excerpts from the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Peter Potamus, which the filmmaker discovered as a child on Spanish television under the title Pepe Pótamus. At once a parable of unexpected pop-historical synergies and a shrewd allegory for the history of colonialism in the Global South, the film forges a seamless continuum between otherwise disparate cultural, political and cinematic orthodoxies. Bold and unpredictable, Pepe breathes with the freedom and conviction of an artist who has fully come into his own.

This event is part of ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts.