Found Super 8mm home movies of wildlife from 1960s apartheid era South Africa and colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) comprise the visual elements of African Film School. In order to disrupt the viewer, American filmmaker Roger Horn juxtaposes these found images with audio he recorded while attending a wildlife film-training program in Cape Town in 2007. Through the disruption of filmmaking conventions Horn looks to make the viewer confront their own stereotypes and ponder the nature of capturing images in Southern Africa.
Loosely inspired by Peter Kubelka’s 1966 film Unsere Afrikareise (Our trip to Africa) and Luis Buñuel’s 1933 film Las Hurdes:Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread), the film employs shaky, out of focus handheld shots and long takes, disrupting the conventions of wildlife filmmaking. Additionally, the dialogue represents a semi-comical reflection on the search to find oneself as a young filmmaker within the context of a new home country in the throws of a post apartheid identity crisis.
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