!aouo !a!a wa
2018 · Namibia
Directed by Walter Stoehr
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Narrated in the San Bushmen language, the film retells the mythic origin story of the cheetah — "the stumbling cheetah" — and interweaves it with the modern conflict in which Namibian livestock farmers regard the world's fastest cat as a pest, asking whether knowing the animal's legend might move people to help save it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most conservation docs genuflect at the altar of endangered charisma; Stoehr flips it by asking whether myth—actual *belief*—moves people better than facts, which is either brilliantly subversive or utterly backwards, and I'm still not sure which.
The film situates itself in a lineage of essayistic documentary that trusts oral tradition as formal argument—expired film stock isn't nostalgia but a deliberate constraint that honors the temporality of spoken myth, creating a rigorous dialogue between colonial image-making and indigenous knowledge.
The decision to narrate entirely in click language without English subtitles forces the viewer into the *position* of the outsider hearing myth as pure sound and image rather than extractable information—one structural choice that does the ideological work of the entire film.
Reviews
Beautiful storytelling with stunning footage captured on expired film stock.