The films of Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias (b. 1985) are shapeshifting objects that rarely stay in one place for long—not unlike the Dominican-born director himself, who studied cinema in Mexico, Argentina, Scotland and the United States before settling in Berlin in 2019. Similarly restless, de Los Santos Arias’ wide-ranging body of work hopscotches between continents as nimbly as it incorporates different film formats and narrative traditions, ranging from speculative fiction to experimental ethnography. Stylistic breadth notwithstanding, a number of themes run throughout his filmography, namely colonialism, cultural memory and language vis-à-vis his standing as a Caribbean artist living and working abroad. With his rhizomatic approach to history and storytelling, de Los Santos Arias—who shoots and edits his films himself—has developed a unique brand of political cinema in which the uncanny and fantastic freely intermingle with more concrete anthropological concerns, a process that has arguably reached its most vivid expression yet with his latest feature, Pepe (2024), which reimagines the life and death of one of Pablo Escobar’s notorious “cocaine hippos.”

The Harvard Film Archive warmly welcomes Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias for two evenings of screenings and conversations including a special free ArtsThursday presentation of his exciting latest feature Pepe.