About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks

This short film, with its immersive, spellbinding sound design, is a 21st-century fable on decolonization. In magnificent footage filmed at Pfaueninsel in southwest Berlin and on the banks of the Magdalena River in Colombia, two narrators recount how people in power introduced the peacock in the 19th century and the hippopotamus in the late 1980s. This voice-over, expressed from two external points of view, eventually shifts to a dialogue between the two animals, wherein they express lucidly the idea that freedom is only temporary, a lure. Through this unique look at these displaced animals, this fantastic essay reflects on the roles of the powerful in transforming the world, as well as on notions of uprooting, adaptation and control. (HSB)

Presented with the support of Goethe-Institut Montreal

competition : International Short and Medium-Length Competition

About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks