Bushman, David Schickele’s long-neglected 1971 film that has been newly restored and re-released for contemporary audiences, plays like a radical act of cinematic excavation, unearthing not just a turbulent moment in American history but also reverberations that feel frighteningly alive in Trump’s 2025 America.
At once docu-fiction, time capsule and political provocation, it speaks to us today with a sharpness that many political films from this decade lack.
Set against the fraught backdrop of 1968 San Francisco, Bushman follows Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam), a Nigerian intellectual and student navigating the promise and peril of the counterculture. The early portions of the film – intercutting languid wanderings through city streets, intimate interview-style monologues, and poetic reminiscences of Nigeria, resonate like Godard or Cassavetes. Gabriel’s outsider status, and his candid reflections on race, belonging and the alien idiosyncrasies of American life, offer a perspective both deeply personal and sharply political.
Schickele initially intended Bushman to be a semi-fictional portrait of a young African abroad. But life – brutal, arbitrary, and profoundly political – intruded with force. Mid-production, Okpokam was arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately deported under dubious charges. The film abruptly collapses into documentary, integrating real stills, testimonies, and Schickele’s own voiceover to narrate the real fate of his lead actor. The effect is jarring, disorienting, and, in its unvarnished confrontation with state power, absolutely riveting.
Watching Bushman in 2025, we can’t help but see unnerving parallels with the United States under Trumpism, especially in the visceral resonance of state power deployed against immigrants, outsiders and people of colour.
In the film, Gabriel’s deportation isn’t just a narrative turn, it’s a brutal reminder of how the machinery of the state can entangle and expel without warning or accountability. In an era when ICE and deportation rhetoric have been weaponised with widespread raids, family separations, and the continued construction of a hostile environment for immigrants, the story cuts through the abstract and grounds us in lived reality.
The effect is jarring, disorienting, and, in its unvarnished confrontation with state power, absolutely riveting
Trump’s America in 2025 continues to grapple with policy and politics that make citizens of some and criminals of others, with scant regard for due process. The spectre of arbitrary exclusion that Gabriel endured feels strikingly familiar.
Schickele and Okpokam’s collaboration becomes a kind of political document, not by intent, but rendered by the stark reality. Bushman doesn’t moralise in the way many contemporary films do and refuses the neat binaries of hero and villain. Gabriel is neither saint nor victim, but an articulate, nuanced human being seeking love, understanding and a place to belong. The sequences that portray his relationships, particularly with Alma and others in the city are shot with empathy and warmth and Okpokam’s gentle voice sails calmly through the film. Yet his ultimate undoing lays bare the American state’s capacity for violence and exclusion.
More than half a century on, Bushman also underscores the enduring absurdity of how societies narrate “otherness.” In the film’s early moments, Americans project exotic fantasies and shallow curiosities onto Gabriel. They fetishise his difference even as they fail to understand it.
Today’s politics, with its talk of “merit,” “border security,” and the taxonomy of human worth, echoes this same impulse to sort, rank, and dismiss. The bureaucratic categorisation that once swept Gabriel out of San Francisco feels all too alive in 2025 with ICE and federal agencies still enforcing hierarchies that decide who belongs and who must go.
Critically, Bushman never relinquishes its compassion. Cinematographically, the black-and-white imagery lingers between lyricism and reportage, the city becomes both playground and cage, its open spaces juxtaposed with the harsh confinements of prison and deportation. The sudden shift from fiction to documentary is not simply a formal trick, but a political indictment, one that asks hard questions about storytelling, agency, and the power structures that determine whose life stories are deemed worthy of being told.
In this sense, the film resonates like a clarion call to cinephiles and citizens alike: cinema isn’t merely about escapism or aesthetic pleasure. It can and should confront injustice, naming the mechanisms that marginalise and erase. Bushman forces us to confront how easily the promise of freedom can be dismantled, how systems of control reassert themselves across decades, and how an individual’s dignity can be jeopardised by the state’s overreach.
Bushman isn’t just a rediscovered classic; it’s a necessary one for our moment, a reminder that the fight against dehumanising state power is not new, but ongoing, and that the stories of those caught in its gears must be seen, heard, and remembered.
Bushman is available on a limited-edition Blu-ray from otherparties.co.uk