Many of the people I mentioned this to responded the same way: “that is one depressing film”. So it was.
The key image is the Russian cargo planes that land and depart from an airstrip on the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. This leads to an exploration of many problems: the voracious Nile Perch, an introduced species that completely outcompeted the native fish and proved unfishable by traditional methods, forcing industrialisation; the demand for Nile Perch overseas that means all the best parts of the fish are too expensive for the locals to eat; the lack of options for those scrabbling to make a living off the fisheries; the lack of local ownership of anything of substance (the fisheries are run by an immigrant Indian/Pakistani cohort, the planes are owned and flown by Russians, etc.); the orphan street children, manufacturing their own narcotics so they can sleep rough without fear; the unchecked spread of AIDS and HIV; the deliveries of foreign arms to sustain local wars.
The film keeps peeling back layers to reveal connections between its problems it depicts, until you are left with a picture of a system that has found temporary stability as it devours its own foundations. Because it is stable, it resists change fiercely; because it is a large and complex system, each individual actor seems powerless to move things in a different direction. And that, I suspect, is why it comes across as depressing – there doesn’t seem to be a way to unpick the terrible knot in place. And implicit in it, although never onscreen, is us – the Western consumer, with our demand for products for our markets, the effects of which set the base conditions that lets everything else unfold as it does. We are profoundly implicated although the film doesn’t come close to pointing the finger – it doesn’t need to.
Anyway. Wikipedia reveals a controversy over the film – unsurprisingly, the Tanzanian government have spoken out against the film. More curiously, a French writer has attacked the film, calling it a colonial exercise, and feuding with the producer – all the relevant links are to articles in French that are beyond my limited grasp of the language. Francophones are invited to follow the resource links at the bottom of that page and report on the substance of this controversy…