REPUBLIC
(Daniel McCabe, USA, 2023, 94 minutes)
"Grasshoppers should not make us go crazy."
This Is Congo filmmaker Daniel McCabe begins his patient, observant documentary, an extension of Michele Sibiloni's 2021 photo book Nsenene, with magnified images of grasshoppers, or "bush crickets," being born. They start out as glossy oblong tubes before poking out their heads and unfolding their impossibly slender limbs. There's nothing quite like them. Many bugs give me the heebie jeebies, but grasshoppers aren't half as creepy as spiders.
From the birth scene, McCabe shifts to remote, hilly Bundibugyo in Kampala where workers are toiling away on some unidentified project. Twenty minutes into the film the foreman reveals that he'll be using the equipment his men have been moving and setting up, including a rickety generator, to capture grasshoppers. McCabe spent three years capturing the capture.
It isn't just difficult work, it's dangerous, disruptive, and time-sensitive, since grasshopper mating season only lasts for a month or two. The equipment, which involves incandescent lights with the glass bulbs removed--treated so that they emanate an eerie green glow at night--can destroy crops and cause permanent skin and vision damage, but it pays more than most other jobs in the area, even those in the healthcare field. In other words, the men stand to make more in three months than the pharmacists who dole out the pills and ointments needed to treat their ailments.
During the film, trappers quarrel with land owners who would prefer that they just go away, but instead they negotiate for the highest fees they can possibly get. It isn't greed; the capture process is so invasive, it can ruin crops for generations, especially when it comes to maize, a Ugandan staple. The trappers also quarrel among themselves. "You look like a cow's anus!," one young man quips to another while struggling with the heavy generator.
Once the grasshoppers start to arrive, they come in Coke-bottle-green droves, flapping and fluttering against the cassava-coated corrugated iron chutes designed to trap them. It's as much a percussive phenomenon as a visual one. Once caught, trappers bring them to town to sell the bushels of bugs on the streets or at market stalls. I couldn't say what happens to them after that, other than they're intended for human consumption. For what it's worth, my dad ate a fried grasshopper while stationed in Asia in the early-1960s, while in the Air Force--probably during a stop in Thailand--and was not impressed. He wasn't grossed-out, necessarily, but to paraphrase David Foster Wallace, it was "a supposedly fun thing he would never do again."
I haven't mentioned any of the workers by name, because McCabe doesn't identify them, putting them on the same plane as the grasshoppers, which may have been the point. Vivid cinematography from McCabe, Michael McCabe, and Michele Sibiloni--including close-up imagery of beetles, caterpillars, and the 35 other creatures listed in the credits--combined with Candyman composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's alternatively playful and meditative electronic score add to the appeal of a documentary that revolves as much around human versus human as human versus insect.
Grasshopper Republic plays Mon, May 13, at 12:30pm at SIFF Downtown and on Wed, May 15, at 9:15pm at Pacific Place. Click here for more information. Images from Cleveland International Film Festival and Doc NYC.
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