Directed By: John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer
1980 | 59 min
Namibia, United States

Sunday, November 13: 1:00 pm

People Center

Co-founder of the distributor Documentary Educational Resources, John Marshall created an unprecedented body of work about the Ju'hoansi of Nyae Nyae in the Kalahari. His first film, The Hunters (1957), is culled from footage shot on a family expedition in the 1950s. In subsequent years, he shot more than one million feet of film of these nomadic people, tracing the changes to their culture over half a century. N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman falls in the middle of this work and takes us from when N!ai was a young girl gathering berries into her 30s making a living as a film subject for anthropologists. Addressing the camera directly, either in song or conversation, N!ai guides us through her own story and that of the Ju'hoansi as they adjust to government imposed restrictions on their movements and a changing economy. Marshall, who died in 2005, made many more films about life in the Kalahari, including the five-part series A Kalahari Family, which premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 2002.

Part of the 35th Anniversary Retrospective