Pepe

12/14/2025

If you’ve ever been to Karnak or Luxor and wandered through the temples, you can easily imagine the sound of the ancient Egyptian deities philosophising in husky tones about mortality as they adopt their animalistic manifestations. One would be a hippo, and though he’s unlikely to have been called “Pepe”, his would be a discourse on this beast’s association with humanity, with his fellow creatures and - somewhat inexplicably, his journey to Colombia where he is now facing army sharpshooters who want to stop him terrorising the locals in the river. The theistic contrast works quite well here because the film itself is an hybrid of drama and natural history film. Set both in Colombia where hippos are not native, and in Namibia where they are more plentiful, we follow two parallel storylines