E-Mail This Article to a Friend Into Africa Darwin’s Nightmare and The Boys of Baraka find doom and bloom BY PETER KEOUGH
	DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE Written and directed by Hubert Sauper | English + Russian + Swahili | 107 minutes | Brattle Theatre: December 2-7 THE BOYS OF BARAKA Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady | 84 minutes | Coolidge Corner
	Related Links + Darwin's Nightmare's official Web site

Scientists say the origins of humanity can be found in Africa. Two new documentaries suggest its destiny may lie there too. Western politicians and the media may ignore the ancient continent, but in its tumult and serenity linger the potential for the our downfall, or our rejuvenation.

The prospects don’t look good at first. In Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare, the shadow of an Ilyushin-76 crosses Lake Victoria. On the ground, the flight-control officer is distracted by a wasp buzzing against the cracked window of the control tower. The wasp gets squashed and the monster cargo plane lands safely, unlike others whose wrecked fuselages litter the side of the runway. On the ground, the plane and the hulks of those that didn’t make it loom like freakish behemoths in the midst of the surrounding shanties, as out of place as the huge Coke bottle that rises like a totem. Two cultures in uneasy cohabitation, one technological and mighty, the other primitive and powerless, both, it seems, doomed to extinction.

Welcome to Mwanza, Tanzania. In wagons in the streets, mirroring the dismembered planes, are enormous chopped-up prehistoric-looking fish, Nile perch on the way to processing in one of the lake-shore plants. The perch is a luxury food fish exported to Europe, flown out by the Ilyushins, a plant owner explains. His colleague points out, almost as an afterthought, that it’s an exotic, predatory species introduced into the lake as a scientific experiment a few decades earlier. Now it’s the only fish that remains.

The full implications of this Darwinian situation are, as the film’s title states it, nightmarish. Sauper tracks down each increasingly depressing nuance like a dogged photojournalist, but also like an artist intent on framing the grotesque, absurd, and beautiful. Many of his images recall photos by Diane Arbus or Garry Winogrand: five identically garbed and bespectacled children singing religious songs in a street full of misery; a war veteran guarding the National Fisheries Institute with a bow and arrows (his predecessor had been murdered); an evangelical preacher showing his desperate congregation a video of Jesus on the Sea of Galilee overseeing the miraculous catch of fish; a Billy Bass on the plant owner’s wall singing "Don’t Worry, Be Happy."

Beyond their æsthetic impact, however, these pictures and incidents, edited with an unobtrusive, relentless logic, add up to a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. The perch have ruined the lake, but they provide the only income for the impoverished people from the back country who settle in squalid villages on banks to become fishermen or prostitutes and eventually die of AIDS. Their orphaned children live on the streets and are victimized by sexual predators or die of neglect. Jonathan, a former street kid, now a painter and "chronologist of forgotten lives," takes Sauper’s camera on a tour of this inferno.

The locals do get something out of this despoliation. The kids, for example, melt discarded fish packages into glue to sniff. At one plant Sauper is told not to photograph a truck; of course he does, following it to its destination: a vast outdoor dumping ground of factory-processed perch carcasses. A one-eyed woman is grateful for the work of sorting through the maggot-infested mess, recycling the remains for local consumption. (At the time, two million Tanzanians were starving.) It’s the trickle-down theory in a nutshell: Europe gets the fillets, Africa the fish heads.

Sometimes Sauper’s irony seems too blunt: a shot of a European Union official praising Mwanza’s "world-class" facilities and "great" sanitation followed by a cut to a one-legged urchin panning water from a filthy ditch. An ecological forum shows a film about the death of the lake and a Tanzanian fat cat insists they show "beautiful" pictures instead because they are "trying to sell their country." But given the material, Sauper shows restraint and detachment and a grim hilarity, and he achieves a kind of poetry.

A resigned village leader, a former schoolteacher, sums up the world this way: it has limited resources, people must scramble for them, the strongest and cruelest prevail. Sauper’s inquiries demonstrate in chilling, dismaying detail the outcome of this philosophy. One question he asks repeatedly is not answered till the very end: what are the Ilyushins that transport the perch to Europe bringing into Africa? All insist they are empty, or bringing in "oil equipment" or "humanitarian" supplies. Finally a Russian pilot in his cups confesses the truth. This is the final piece of a perfect metaphor for our current system of economy — a metaphor that is all too real.

Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady’s The Boys of Baraka begins on a down note as well: youths and children on a Baltimore street at night, idle, frustrated, volatile. Police cars everywhere. Fires and violence. A title card points out that 76 percent of Baltimore’s children won’t graduate from high school. Nothing to be done. Turn the channel.

Hope comes from an unlikely place: Africa. A local program sends a handful of at-risk but promising pre-adolescent boys for two years to the Baraka School, a no-nonsense institution in the wilds of Kenya. Like the recent Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom, the film profiles some of the participants and follows their fortunes. Pugnacious Richard and his little brother Romesh see Baraka as their only chance to escape the ghetto; so does their steely mother. Dreamy Montrey disdains the drug dealers of his neighborhood and views an untroubled Africa as a place where he can pursue his talent for math and his dream of becoming a scientist. Little Devon, his mother an addict, his father best forgotten, shares with his religious grandmother his hope of bettering himself in his new environment and becoming a preacher.

After two weeks among the exotic wildlife on the dusty savannah, deprived of TV and Game Boys, many want to go home. (Romesh sits stubbornly by the gate with a suitcase bigger than himself.) They persevere, however, and the months pass. Some boys show remarkable progress — but what exactly happens? The filmmakers peek into some classes where rote-like vocabulary drills take place. They follow as teachers apply tough love and new-agey buzz words to steer their wards from violence to "appropriate" ways of dealing with differences. Two chronic offenders at each other’s throats are sent off to a remote spot and left on their own to cooperate in setting up a tent. The boys all climb Mount Kenya before heading back to Baltimore on summer break. Somehow, the tactics work.

Unlike Sauper, Ewing and Grady don’t go very far beyond what’s uplifting, and they leave some nagging questions. Why are all the instructors at Baraka white? Why do the boys have so little interaction with the country and people they traveled thousands of miles to visit? When the school is beset by terrorist threats and threatens to close, a concerned parent asks why can’t the kids continue their program in America? No one answers. The boys of Baraka inspire with their determination and persistence, but the filmmakers shy from the same virtues when it comes to looking into causes and cures.