A restored indie gem from 1971 – The Hollywood Reporter

Paul Eyam Nze Okpokam and Ellen Featherstone in “Bushman”

Courtesy of Milestone Film & Video/Kino Lorber

About an hour in brief and dazzling Bushman, the central character announces, “I need a hamburger,” and then the screen fades to black for a few seconds. When the film resumes, it is no longer a drama animated by a street documentary feel, but a straightforward work of realism. Drawing on footage in this final phase while maintaining the visual fluency of the previous story, the final ten minutes tell the story of why director David Schickel stopped filming for a year: he was instead working to secure the release of his wrongfully imprisoned main man from prison.

There are strong similarities between Gabriel, the on-screen outsider, and Paul Eyam Nze Okpokam, the man who plays him. They both grew up in a Nigerian village. Like Gabriel, Okpokam was a graduate student at San Francisco State College. The NIS scenario was scheduled to end with Gabriel being deported after getting into trouble with the law. Before he could film those scenes, Okpokam’s adventure in the United States ended in exactly this way.

But despite the sharp knife of injustice, Bushman Not the angry bore or the frustrated lament. Filled with emotion, sly humor, satirical beats, and the inevitable heartbeat of rebellion—most of the film was shot in San Francisco in 1968—it’s the loving story of a wisecracking innocent on the outside, and the not-quite-warm reception he receives.

It was made with a seed grant from the American Film Institute when the organization itself was just a seedling, and was lauded on the festival circuit in 1971 and 1972. Bushman It emerges from the shadows of forgotten indies, thanks to Milestone and Kino Lorber, with a luminous 4K restoration that will be shown in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with a Los Angeles bow to follow.

It’s a sequel of sorts Give me a riddle, the vivid hour-long 1966 documentary that Schickel produced and directed for the Peace Corps, after convincing the agency’s leadership that his unorthodox approach was worth a try. They were thinking more along the lines of a clean Disney version. His film, which features beards and alcohol consumption by Peace Corps volunteers, carries a disclaimer that it “does not necessarily reflect Peace Corps policy.”

It’s also a compelling historical snapshot, a portrait of the vanguard of young Nigerians in the years before the newly independent country became embroiled in civil war. Okpokam is one of the four charismatic Nigerians in Central puzzleAnd friends and students of NIS when he was a Peace Corps volunteer a few years ago. (Another Legion vet, Roger Landrum, is the director’s on-screen foil.) Both films end with an image of Okpokam’s smiling face, though the contexts couldn’t be more different. (puzzlea remarkable work in its own right, will be shown privately in Seattle, coinciding with its release Bushmanwith more theatrical possibilities in the works.)

BushmanGabriel has spent three months of his stay in America as the film opens. The evocative shimmer of the black-and-white cinematography of David Myers (whose later credits would include Alan Rudolph) Welcome to Los Angeles And Martin Scorsese Rolling Thunder Review(Myers’ last film before his death) finds Gabriel walking barefoot in a deserted part of town with his shoes balanced on his head. The opening title card sets the mood, reminding us that in 1968 Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Bobby Hutton (the Black Panther killed by Oakland police) were among the recent dead, and that Nigeria’s civil war has entered its second year.

The woman Gabriel has been seeing, Alma (Eileen Featherstone), is packing her bags to return to Watts, feeling called to serve her home community. In one of the film’s many insightful lines, she points out that all of her friends there are either raising unhappy children or, if they’re among the “best people” — the ones who have “something to say” — are in prison. Featherstone, who has clearly never acted before and will never do so again, brings fire to the role, and her scenes with Okpokam ooze with the playful intimacy and unspoken tension of the lovers in their final hours together.

Another source of stress for Gabriel, who is working on a master’s degree in drama, is his expired work visa. He needs to find a job without being around, and avoid demonstrations and clashes with police over the San Francisco State College strike, a months-long protest led by the Black Student Union and the coalition known as the Third World Liberation Front. The details of the campus unrest are not directly addressed in the main body of the film, which, through the eyes of the protagonist, views his new surroundings not in terms of political divisions but through the artist’s sense of person-to-person discovery.

Via voice-over and in an interview-style monologue to the camera, Gabriel talks about his upbringing: traditional initiation rituals, ancestral shrines, and Catholic education. He seemed to have known all his life what it meant to be between two worlds. However, Americans are on another level of strangeness. A loud motorcyclist (Mike Sly) who transports Gabriel asks him to “say something in Afrikaans.” There’s a one-night stand with a white sociology student (Anne Scofield) whose infatuation with “this normal guy who’s at home with himself” doesn’t take long to turn into something very ugly. There’s the wealthy gay man (Jack Nance), a borderline caricature who “longs,” as Schickel strikingly puts it in his synopsis, “to be raped by the Dark Continent.” But they are not all evil; Something real is bubbling beneath the surface in Gabriel’s romance with Susie (Timothy Neier).

In a letter to his son, Schickel wrote that “Paul was a lively soul who always prided himself on being a bushman. Being in the bush in Nigeria was like being in country America, rural and simple perhaps, but full of heart.” The director’s friend, who was a student in The former and subject of the documentary, he is also a captivating leading man, and is absent from most of the film’s final sequence Bushmanafter laughingly expressing that all Americans need burgers, has become a painful void.

Okpokam returned to Nigeria again (he was not allowed to return to the United States), returned to teaching and writing plays, as well as acting and directing in rural theater groups. He died in 2018, at the age of 78. An educator and independent filmmaker, he died at the age of 62 in 1999. His dynamic, confident filmmaking takes on new life with… BushmanRecovery.

Picking up the story two years after Okpokam’s arrest, Shekel points out in the film’s concluding section that some of the buildings in the original footage have been demolished. Even at the festival premiere, Bushman It was a time capsule, providing living proof of the city’s pre-gentrification sprawls. Now, in its new 4K glory, this scattered gem is alive with fascinating ghosts, including a number of performers who will never appear on screen again. “The traveler is like a ghost,” Gabriel says to that obnoxious man on the motorcycle. “It continues.”