John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer
1980 | 59 min | Namibia, United States
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.