If the end of the world needs a location, Tanzania is a prime choice of real estate. This austere, grueling and very troubling documentary depicts the many woes afflicting the central African country. Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper paints Tanzania as the victim of a complex and punishing dynamic that exists between industrialized nations and the developing world.

The title of Darwin's Nightmare refers to the bitterly ironic evolutionary triumph of a peculiar inhabitant of Lake Victoria, the planet's largest tropical lake. Introduced to the lake by a scientist in the 1960s, the Nile Perch has succeeded in killing off nearly all the native fish species. It's so ravenous, it even eats its own young. Though an ecological disaster for Lake Victoria, this development has been a great boon to the fishery business, which now exports thousands of tons of Nile Perch to Europe every year. Russian cargo planes arrive nearly daily to drop off their contents before loading up with fish. Sometimes the Russians bring food for the area's millions of starving refugees. Other times -- as Sauper eventually confirms after much digging around -- they import the weapons that enable impoverished Africans to murder each other in one or another of the civil wars taking place nearby.

The list of tribulations doesn't end there, lest we forget the spread of AIDS and the constant threat of famine. Sauper also discovers how much the local street urchins like getting high off chemicals in the fish boxes. It's more than enough calamities to appease any Old Testament prophet or, for that matter, any WTO-hating critic of globalized business practices. Sauper's film plays to the latter sensibility a little too cravenly, often relying on easy juxtapositions for effect, i.e., cutting from a panel of fat-cat European bureaucrats to African children beating each other for food. The filmmaker is also less inclined to present his human subjects as people than as symptoms of the greater crisis. Yet Darwin's Nightmare exhibits great force as a film, if only because the situation it presents is so deeply appalling. It's the feel-bad movie of the summer.

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