In 1968, Peace Corps veteran David Schickele began his first feature film, Bushman, about the experiences of a young Nigerian man teaching at San Francisco State College. Beginning as a fiction film based on lead actor Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam’s experiences, his character Gabriel navigates academic West Coast life and the racism and systemic "othering” that permeate his daily interactions. Real-life events overtook the film when Okpokam was falsely accused of terrorism during the university strike of that year. Newly restored, this important yet rarely screened docudrama draws on cinéma vérité, experimental, and new wave cinema influences. (David Schickele, 1971, 35mm to DCP, 75 minutes)
New restoration by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive and The Film Foundation; on loan from Kino Lorber and Milestone.