'DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE' TELLS OF TRUE TRAGEDY IN A FISH TALE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE'' is the most depressing and important movie you'll see this year.

Hubert Sauper's Oscar-nominated documentary takes us to the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria. Believed by many to be the birthplace of humankind, it looks more, these days, like the graveyard of civilization.

Here's what happened: A few decades ago, somebody introduced the non-native Nile perch into the waters of the world's largest tropical lake. Over time, the voracious creatures, some of which can grow as big as a man, ate pretty much every native species smaller than a crocodile. This led to massive environmental degradation, of course; many of the extinct fish fed on waste that is now choking off the lake's oxygen content.

But wait, there's good news (until we learn the full reality of it, anyway): Nile perch are good eatin', and young men from all over impoverished Tanzania come to Victoria's shores to fish for the massive beasts or work in the processing plants that turn them into filets for the European market. Poor Russian pilots fly in old Soviet cargo planes to bring the delicious meat to hungry First Worlders.

So, at least some people are making a living who otherwise wouldn't be, right? Well, not really. The Africans aren't paid enough to be able to afford the filets. Heads and other otherwise inedible fish parts are dumped along the shore, where the locals fry them up in horrific, maggot-infested smoking pits. There are no doctors or infirmaries in the fishing camps, but plenty of HIV-infected prostitutes. And those Russian planes? Although their crews try to deny it, they don't come in empty. Many are loaded with weapons for Africa's wars.

Yes, it's survival of the strongest, taken to capitalist extremes above the water as it is biologically below.

Sauper and his cameraman spent a good deal of time (and no small amount of bribe money) getting to know the people eking out a living on the shores of the lake. Every story is heartbreaking, some tragically more so, but of course the saddest souls are the orphaned children.

These kids cook down a kind of sniffing glue from the fish-packing materials. As we watch a boy who couldn't be more than 10 inhale on a darkened, trash-strewn street, we want to yell at the filmmakers to take the toxic poison away from him. But as he nods off, we remember that it's his only way of numbing the harsh pain of his existence. Besides, the documentarians (and we, their audience) aren't exploiting him nearly as much as the pleased representatives of the European Union - seen earlier commending the local industry for the fine product it's exporting, and urging it to keep the quality up - are the Tanzanians' whole nation; indeed, their whole world.

``Darwin's Nightmare'' leaves as profound a sense of hopelessness as any movie I've ever seen. Yet by showing us so wretched an environment through an unblinking, grimy lens, Sauper puts us in empathetic tune with Africa's agony in a way that a well-meaning but romanticized fiction such as ``The Constant Gardener'' could never do. It's disturbing to realize that consumer cultures such as ours are a major cause of the problem, and that it's growing so dire that it could one day affect us just as horribly.

But it is something that we need to be aware of. Desperately so, whether we know it or not.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE - Three and one half stars

(Not rated: drug use, language, children in jeopardy)

Director: Hubert Sauper.

Running time: 1 hr. 47 min.

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

In a nutshell: Harrowing, Oscar-nominated documentary examines environmental and social devastation in Tanzania caused by export fishing on Lake Victoria. Globalism has never looked so ugly, nor been so necessary to look at.