1968: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Bobby Hutton are among the recent dead. In Nigeria, the Civil War is entering its second year with no end in sight. In San Francisco, the adventures of Gabriel, a young Nigerian reflects tribal, personal, and racial frictions during the tumultuous sixties. Truth is stranger than fiction in Bushman, a rare sort of film portrait, part document, part imagined – poetic in its approach to real events.
Direction
Schickele blurs reality until you're lost too.
Acting
Okpokam plays himself and his own absence.
Editing
Nigeria and California bleed into each other.
Director
David Schickele
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam was a real student in California when cast; much of his 'character's' biography was his own.
Released the same year as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Bushman represents a parallel, less celebrated strand of Black independent cinema that refused genre entirely.
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