Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Wicksteed, Richard / All Films

SanDance!

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 10:15:02 GMT

Set in the transcendent dance culture of Africa’s San First Peoples, SanDance! celebrates humanity’s original essence of dance.

This enchanting film follows San dancers from rehearsals in remote villages in Namibia, South Africa and Botswana to their electrifying performances at the Kuru San Dance Festival in Botswana. Held on full moon, the festival draws San dancers and musicians from across southern Africa to the largest annual gathering of San peoples. The film expresses the hopes and dreams of San dancers as they strive to revitalize their beautiful dance traditions, which are threatened by ongoing marginalization of the San’s fragile hunter-gatherer culture.

Radiating from the Kuru San Dance Festival into the visionary world of the trance-healing dance, SanDance! illuminates the spiritual traditions that underpin ancestral San culture across southern Africa.

Proceeds from SanDance! directly benefit the KDT, and the dance groups featured in this film.

“The film’s immersion into Southern Africa’s indigenous cultures touches on a wide berth of subjects including ancient history, recent history, colonialism, genocide, dance, language, subsistence, ecology, and philosophy. Because of its shorter runtime and mass of content, SanDance! will easily fit into many curricula.” – Frank Gunderson, Yearbook of Traditional Music

“SanDance! is billed as a journey to the heart of Africa’s original dance culture, but it’s much more than that. It opens a door into a segment of African culture that is in danger of dying out... Richard Wicksteed has spent decades filming and working with the San, making at least 10 films of varying length. The level of acceptance and their trust in him is clear from this sensitive and well-paced portrayal of an important culture under threat... I watched [the film] more than once, and still want to watch it again. For the dance. For the music. For the story. For the pleasure.” – Michael Britton, Music in Africa

Selected Screenings & Awards

Best Documentary, Garden Route Int'l Film Festival, South Africa, 2021

Award of Excellence, Documentary Feature, Impact Docs Award, 2021

Globe Award, ARFF, Barcelona, Spain 2021

Best Cinematography, International Feature, Thin Line Festival, USA 2021

International Council for Traditional Music, Ghana, 2023

Award of Excellence - Original Score, Docs Without Borders, USA, 2021

Award of Excellence, IndieFEST Film Awards, USA 2021

Best Cinematography, ABQ Indie Film Fest, USA, 2021

Best Feature - Documentary, Bucharest Film Awards, Romania, 2021

Buenos Aires Film Festival, Brazil, 2021

Osaka International Film Festival, Japan, 2021

Garifuna International Indigenous Film Festival, USA, 2021

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In God's Places

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:44:00 GMT

In God's Places
Buy Now: $320.00

Iindawo Zikathixo – In God's Places traces the cultural legacy of the indigenous San (Bushmen) people in south-eastern Africa as it was shaped by the migration and interaction with Bantu and European peoples. Filmed in the Drakensburg Mountains in the Transkei, as well as in Lesotho and the northeastern Cape, the film features the indigenous rock art as a background against which the story of the Bushmen unfolds.

Bushmen hunter-gatherers were the first people to inhabit the southern African landscape. For thousands of years, they migrated over the Drakensberg foothills, following the wild animals they hunted and painted. Iindawo Zikathixo explores the cultural interaction that developed between the Bushmen, Xhosa and Sotho-speaking peoples, and exposes the merciless force with which European settlers dispossessed the Bushmen of their hunting and gathering grounds. Some aspects of Bushmen culture survived the genocide, and Iindawo Zikathixo investigates these through music, dance, oral history and traditional rituals in remote communities and those that intermarried with San and absorbed their cultural practices.

A central location of the film is the Inxu River Valley in the former Transkei, where the last known Bushman rock artist, Lindiso, lived, painted and made rain for the Xhosa-speaking Mpondomise until about 1930. The filmmakers visit Lindiso's painted shelter with his grandson, Maqulana and with Sipani Togu, an Mpondomise diviner of Bushman descent. Mr. Togu conducts rainmaking and other rituals he associates with the Bushmen in the painted rockshelters of the Inxu Valley.

Iindawo Zikathixo offers a snapshot of the persistence of Bushmen expressive forms and practices and will be of interest to all those concerned with southern African cultural heritage.

[Note: although some people featured in this film are shown touching rock art, this occurs in the traditional or ritual contexts and is not usually acceptable because touching damages the paintings. In the interests of conserving rock art, visitors to painted shelters are advised not to touch the rock art under any circumstances.]

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Bushman's Secret

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 09:36:00 GMT

Bushman's Secret
Buy Now: $320.00

When South African filmmaker Rehad Desai travels to the Kalahari to investigate global interest in ancient Bushmen knowledge, he meets Jan van der Westhuizen, a fascinating Khomani San traditional healer. Jan's struggle to live close to nature is hampered by centuries of colonial exploitation of the San Bushmen and of their land.

Unable to survive as they once did hunting and gathering, the Khomani now live in a state of poverty that threatens to see the last of this community forever. One plant could make all the difference. Hoodia, a cactus used by Bushmen for centuries, has caught the attention of a giant pharmaceutical company. It now stands to decide the fate of the Khomani San.

Bushman's Secret features breathtaking footage of the Kalahari landscape, and exposes us to a world where modernity collides with ancient ways, at a time when each has, strangely, come to rely on the other.

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