The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“My personal favorite [Il Cinema Ritrovato] festival discovery … An example of cinema’s ability to encode little packages of explosive revelation into its fabric like so much TNT, just waiting for the next viewer to trigger another real-time detonation.”

Jessica Kiang, Film Comment

A startling conversion from fiction to cruel reality occurs in American director David Schickele’s shape-shifter of a film, among the most buzzed-about rediscoveries of 2023. Bushman begins as a spritely, Cassavetes-esque portrait of a Nigerian man adrift in 1968 San Francisco. Cut off from the civil war raging in his homeland, Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam) struggles to navigate a countercultural upswell in America and his status as an outsider in both White and Black circles. (Gabe is African but not Black, a difference raised by his Watts-born girlfriend.) Although the movie, to this point, adopts various cinéma vérité methods—including interview segments of the character recounting his life, as a ​“bushman,” in Nigeria—a sudden rupture of the real, a twisted irony that hijacks the film and veers it into documentary, rattles the narrative you think you know. ​“Truth was not stranger than fiction,” admits Schickele, ​“just a little faster.”

In English with English subtitles and open captions

“With irony, poetry, and a delicate touch, Bushman leads us into the darkness of the beginnings of an odyssey. And for a few days, you are unable to think of anything else.”

Cecilia Cenciarelli, Il Cinema Ritrovato

“Both a remarkably sensitive study of a man caught between cultures and a tough examination of the subculture in which he lived.”

Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times