This simple movie is a real charmer and has gained a cult following worldwide, which is pretty remarkable for a South African film shot on a budget and which took four years to complete. A canny Bushman, but one totally ignorant of the world outside the Kalahari Desert, finds a Coca Cola bottle that has been dropped from a light airplane; he takes it back to his extended family who have never seen anything like it and who find various uses for it. However when it begins to cause friction amongst the family, our hero wonders why the Gods have given it to him and he decides to rid himself of the cursed object by dropping it off the edge of the world. As he goes off on his journey, we meet the film's others characters: a kind but klutzy biologist and his native sidekick, a sophisticated woman who has come to teach in a local school, and a bunch of revolutionaries who take her and her charges hostage. The film is not a staged documentary in the mould of "Nanook of the North" but a work of fiction based on the landscape and politics of the area. Played with humour and with a central performance from the Bushman that would grace any effort, it is a movie that it is impossible not to like, even at its silliest.
A sequel followed in 1989 with the same native star encountering different "fat people" (his view of Westerners) while he searches for his two children who have become trapped on a poacher's truck. This one also features broad comedy mixed with the threat of danger and is nearly a worthy follow-up.
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