BUSHMAN

"For a few days you are unable to think of anything else," Il Cinema Ritrovato co-director Cecilia Cenciarelli rightly observes of this astonishing rediscovery by David Shickele. Interweaving past and present (and the organ music of Henry Purcell's Ground in C Minor with tribal chants and Yoruba percussion), Schickele's film focuses on his friend Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam (playing a man named Gabriel), who straddles two worlds with firm roots in neither. The young Nigerian, having escaped a bloody civil war back home, finds himself adrift in a San Francisco riven by its own cultural antipathies and political violence. Gabriel observes the foibles of then contemporary African-American culture with an outsider's incisive eye, yielding a vibrant snapshot of the nation's racial politics - through interracial romance, cross-cultural misunderstandings, and countercultural joy - before the directors' voice abruptly intrudes to narrate star Okpokam's enraging fate, and the film morphs into a documentary -- as Okpokam was accused of a crime he did not commit and was thrown in prison before being expelled from the country.

"With one eye on cinéma vérité, the European new waves and early Cassavetes, and the other on African pioneers like Sembène, Ecaré and Hondo," Cenciarelli writes, "Schickele not only condemns the reactionary and racist America which will later frame Gabriel on the slightest of pretexts, but also the liberal America of progressive intellectuals who quote McLuhan and Malraux but lapse into rhetoric and misunderstand the deeper meaning of human experience. With irony, poetry and a delicate touch, BUSHMAN leads us into the darkness of the beginnings of an odyssey."

And don't miss Shickele's companion film GIVE ME A RIDDLE screening 2/13!