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A time capsule of the late 1960s and a prescient hybrid that shifts between times, countries and genres, Bushman is a rare sort of film portrait; part documentary, part imagined - poetic in its approach to real events.
In 1968, David Schickele cast his friend Paul Okpokam as the lead in a fiction film, playing Gabriel, a man much like himself – a Nigerian student living in San Francisco, navigating life and relationships in liberal America, with its profound complexities, contradictions and racism at every turn.
What starts as a richly nuanced and humorous slice of 1960s San Fran takes a decisive turn when Paul Okpokam is wrongfully arrested during a strike at San Francisco State College. Unable to finish his film without his lead actor, Schickele pivots powerfully into documentary to trace what happens next, finding that “Truth was not stranger than fiction, just a little faster.”
The short film to, from will play before our screenings of Bushman. By poet Olivia Douglass, this work has been commissioned by Other Parties in response to Bushman. to, from, gets to the heart of the tensions between the estranged and embodied experiences of the African diaspora.