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The chronological placement of BUSHMAN manifests itself along brutal political conflicts. The assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent protests in the USA took place at the same time as the civil war in Nigeria in 1968. That year, Gabriel (Paul Okpokam) arrives in San Francisco from Nigeria. Following him, the filmic narrative exposes how encounters with conservatives and leftists alike are interwoven with racist projections.
Until BUSHMAN is finally overtaken by violent reality and turns from a feature film into a documentary: While the original script only addressed the civil rights protests at San Francisco State College and the accompanying police violence as a peripheral issue, they eventually slipped into the course of the narrated story as reality. In BUSHMAN, this reality makes itself felt, overtakes the fiction and tells of all-encompassing repression and those who rebel against it through protest, strike and film.
Neglected since its first screenings in 1971, Bushman was restored in 2023. The current restoration by the Pacific Film Archives was awarded a prize at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2023