Since THE GREAT DANCE, a second related short film (14 minutes 45 seconds long) has been completed. Directed by Michael Duffett, a South African documentary maker, BEING SAN fills in the social and political background to the lives of bushmen today. It is intimately connected to the first film, because it follows a San couple showing THE GREAT DANCE to other bushmen. It is a rare, humbling, and inspiring opportunity to see the reactions of a people portrayed in the film.

BEING SAN - INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR

"I had been very moved by THE GREAT DANCE. Normally I hate seeing animals being killed on the screen - but somehow this was different. There was something particularly natural about the animals being caught, killed and eaten. There was, for me, a spiritual component to it. I came to realise the extraordinary relationship that the bushmen have with their environment. I think THE GREAT DANCE is a beautiful film and it alerts us to the realities facing not only the San bushmen of Southern Africa, but also other indigenous people around the world.

I felt that I wanted to make a short film that complemented THE GREAT DANCE. I felt that if audiences around the world understood more about the previous and present circumstances of the San bushman, they would find the film even more powerful. I also was very keen to find out how the bushmen felt about the film.

I took THE GREAT DANCE to a group of San bushmen who were only sixty miles/a hundred kilometres north of my home in Cape Town. These bushmen live in the Kalahari (900 miles/1500 km north) and they were staying on a farm to learn more about the business side of arts and crafts, how to conduct small businesses up in the Kalahari. Seven bushmen watched the video. Immediately, I could see that they were captivated by what they saw. I had seldom seen such concentration and fascination. One chap, Rooikat, asked for the video to be stopped. He disappeared, and returned five minutes later, dressed in his traditional loincloth. He said that he wanted to get into his loincloth as "The film made me feel very proud."

After the film, Rooikat and his wife Mieta said that he would love to take the movie back to his people in the Kalahari. I thought that was a great idea, as did Craig and Damon Foster, the filmmakers. They were very inspired to hear of the favourable reactions to their film. A few weeks later, myself, Nicola Graydon - an English journalist (see the Guardian article below), Rooikat and Mieta and Chris Lotz departed for our trip north.

In our short program you will see conditions under which San bushmen live in South Africa. The first place we went to was Smidtsdrift, a dumping ground for the San. Most of the 4500 San, relocated there from Namibia, have languished in this tent city for 10 years. It is quite pitiful and yet the inner strength of these people obviously helps them to survive. I would estimate that easily half of the camp gathered to watch the film, under a beautiful sky. The audience simply loved what they saw - again it was very inspiring, The young people were seeing for the first time how their grandparents and ancestors lived. The next day we bumped into an elderly San bushman, well into his sixties - he had seen the film the night before and told us that he was determined to go back to Namibia, somehow, to do one more final hunt before he dies.

We then travelled further north to Witdraai in the Kalahari - a group of bushmen had settled on ground ceded to them a few years back. We showed the film alongside a fantastic sunset. It was simply beautiful and everybody from the surrounding areas came to watch the film. The generator to power the video machine and projector did not want to work. There was a mad rush to get it going before we lost the light. We just made it in time and the results were spectacular - certainly from a filming point of view.

Again The group was spellbound and there was much pointing at the screen, smiling, nodding of heads, exclamations.

After the film, ended we did some interviews and the comments were profound. One very old lady pointed to the screen and said, " We want to live like that - that's all". A young bushman, I would say he was in his 20's, said " After seeing this film, I am proud now to be called a bushman".

And that is what the Great Dance is all about. It is resulting in the San bushmen beginning to feel proud of their heritage. Isn't this what serious filmmaking should be all about? I think so. This is a film that does make a difference.

I am very proud to also mention that the reception we received on our journey has prompted Ster - Kinekor, a film distributor to show the film, from a mobile unit, to all settlements of bushmen throughout rural South Africa. " Michael Duffett

BEING SAN - GUARDIAN ARTICLE To see this story with its related links on the SocietyGuardian site, go to http://www.societyguardian.co.uk

The big picture
What happens when hunting is banned where it is truly a way of life?
Nicola Graydon on an award-winning film that charts the decline of bushman culture
Tuesday January 23 2001
The Guardian

It is 5.30pm. The bottle store is closed and young men are watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger video in a khaki army tent that is hot as an oven. Women walk listlessly across the vast, dusty compound of the semi-refugee camp at Smidtsdrift in South Africa, where 4,000 !XU and Khwe San bushmen and their families have waited over 10 years for resettlement (the exclamation mark before names is another letter in their alphabet which produces a clicking sound).

Only children seem to be interested as, like latter-day vaudevillians, we set up the projector, screen and generator near a large thorn tree for an open air screening of THE GREAT DANCE - a feature documentary about !Xo San bushman hunters who live several hundred miles north, in the heart of the Kalahari desert.

Earlier in the day, Mieta Gooi, a tiny chisel-cheeked bushman grandmother had announced the screening on the local radio station K-X Radio. "This film made my heart sore," her voice wavers. "It reminded me of the old life. It is about people like us, about our race and it made us proud."

Mieta and husband Rooikat, had been so moved by the film at an informal screening in Cape Town, that they asked the film-makers if they could take it home to show their families.

The tented camp, known as Mahongo - "place of suffering" - is a depressing pit stop on the way. Stunted trees give no relief from the blinding midday sun or the wind blowing through the camp, pirouetting in dramatic "wind devils" - mini tornadoes - which send dust, paper, plastic bags high into the air. Nothing much happens here.

On a tiny fire in the centre of Katoti's tent, a weak soup with a rotting fish head is cooking. It has been a long time since her family has had meat.

But it used not to be like that. Back in Namibia, her husband Peza had been a renowned hunter. "He hunted eland, kudu, buffalo and would bring meat to the whole village," she says. "But there is nothing here: no animals to hunt, no fruit to eat, no water, no wood or grass. There is only air to live on. Sometimes God brings you a good dream, sometimes he brings you a bad dream. This is a bad dream."

The last 350 years in southern Africa has been devastating for the San. In that time they have been pushed off their land, hunted with guns, forced to work on white farms and prevented from speaking their languages. It is remarkable they have survived at all.

And it has been at least two decades since these San bushmen, former trackers with the South African Defence Force from Namibia and Angola, have lived as hunter-gatherers. The teenagers wear baseball caps and trainers, want education and computers, while many of the older men, frustrated by loss of land and animals, drink themselves into a stupor.

Last year, THE GREAT DANCE swept the awards at Wildscreen 2000, winning three Pandas, the equivalent of Oscars in the natural history world, and beating off competition from David Attenborough and Walking with Dinosaurs. In New York it was highly acclaimed by the critics and in South Africa it became the most popular feature documentary after Bueno Vista Social Club.

Co-directors Craig and Damon Foster, two South African brothers, filmed in the central Kalahari on and off for two years, travelling 50kms a day through the bush in temperatures of over 45C for a month at a time, returning to Cape Town, skeletal and dehydrated.

Their aim was to capture footage of the mythic San "chasing hunt" when, if poison runs out in the dry season, master hunters chase down their prey until the animal collapses from sheer exhaustion - running for hours in the midday heat, when (in the words of the San), the sand "burns like a second sun."

The brothers knew they were filming a lifestyle under huge pressure but had underestimated the wealth of knowledge still alive to this generation. "They have an understanding of the natural world which would confound the greatest western scientists. They feel and see the bush in a way that we could hardly grasp, reading signs invisible to our eyes and hardened sensibilities," says Craig.

"Each tiny mark in the sand tells a story. They carry the weather of the last two weeks in their heads alongside an enormous understanding of tracks and animal behaviour. These skills take at least 25 years to master."

The Fosters took early cuts of the film back to the hunters who helped them edit the footage and even gave them the idea to put miniature cameras on to the animals to best show what they are feeling as they hunt. "They explained how eventually they become the mind of their prey, how they feel the stripe of a gemsbok on their cheeks, the prickle of animal sweat on their limbs and the trickle of blood on their ribs before they make a kill. Their hunting relies not on their weapons but on their uncanny ability to divine the animal's movements and the mood of the winds. It is like a sixth sense to them," says Craig.

"We had no idea how important hunting was to their culture until we began filming," says Craig. "They told us that even if the animals disappeared they would still hunt, for it is about them feeling the land, being in nature, divining the weather. It is a spiritual experience as much as it is to do with finding meat."

But how would the film go down at Mahongo? There the audience has long since given up hope of being able to hunt again. We are worried that no one will come, but Mieta Gooi's plea across the airwaves has worked. As daylight fades, the screen flickers over the captivated faces of at least 2,000 men, women and children sitting in the cooling sand.

They are visibly captivated as they watch !Nqate Karoha and Xlhoase move through the bush. They yelp in amazement at the unfurling of a giant centipede and gasp at the footage of cheetahs and snakes and, unused to film editing which compresses cooking time, howl with laughter when the hunters eat their prey.

The young men's faces glow in some half-forgotten recognition when the chasing hunt sequence sees Karoha chasing a kudu to its death. The audience goes wild in their appreciation.

"The San is born to be a hunter and yet I have no right to hunt," says Peza Dela. THE GREAT DANCE has reminded him of his impotence. "If I do not hunt then I am no longer a San, it is in our blood. I must hunt. If you take away this right, you are trying to kill me slowly."

The next day Peza takes us to his tent, strips to a threadbare thong, grabs a bow and arrow and speeds out into the blinding sun. Much to the amusement of his wife and their young grandchildren, he runs helter-skelter around the neighbours' tents before heading for the thorny scrub beyond, bringing the bow to his shoulder and letting an arrow fly in a spinning arc to thud uselessly into the ground a good 100 metres away.

Trotting back to camp, as lithe at 68 as a dancer half his age, Peza grins in delight at his impromptu display. "That film woke my spirit up. It has been a long time since I have been able to hunt. For years I have been trying to hide from my spirit. Now I must go back to Namibia and hunt my last eland to make the spirit of my grandfather happy."

He may never do it. Six months after filming ended, all the individual hunting licences of the !Xo San were removed. If they are today caught hunting without a permit they risk jail and heavy fines.

Craig is appalled: "This is devastating for them. For the San, hunting is as important as breathing - it is a vital part of their culture, linked to story-telling and dancing, their relationship with the animals, the insects, the weather and the land - and their ancestors who have hunted this land for 30,000 years."

For further information and pictures of THE GREAT DANCE see www.senseafrica.com

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