Pepe
In collaboration with Fiacine and the Instituto Cervantes, the Dominican Republic Film Academy presents the feature film Pepe at the Instituto Cervantes in Los Angeles as a candidate for the 2026 Oscar for Best International Feature Film.
Pepe is a 2024 drama film written and directed by Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias. The film stars John Narváez and Sor María Ríos, who voices Pepe, the first and last hippopotamus to die in America, who appears as a ghost and tells his story using the powerful oral tradition of these communities.
The film is an international co-production between the Dominican Republic, Namibia, Germany and France, and had its world premiere at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Bear.
Synopsis: A young hippopotamus, known as Pepe, a name
given to him by the Colombian media, was killed in the Colombian jungle, but he
returns as a ghost. He is the voice of a hippopotamus, or so he says. He has no
concept of time, only of a past that haunts him. ‘Is that noise mine? What do I
use to make it?’ The animal is sure of one thing: he is no longer alive. He was
the first and last of his species to be killed in America. We enter a world of
many stories, each of which contains more stories within it. With seriousness
and humour, honesty and deception, the images and sounds convey the powerful
discourse of places where creatures like Pepe perished without ever
understanding their true situation.