And "vee haff vays" of finding full-length movies that you wouldn't find on YouTube. Here is the full-length movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy" which was filmed in Botswana and Namibia, or South-West Africa as it was still called when I lived and worked there in the late 1960s.
The film is a comedy about what happens when a pilot drops an empty Coca-Cola bottle into the Kalahari Desert, and it is found by a Bushman who has never seen such a thing before. The bottle soon becomes an coveted object among a tribe that has always shared everything. So one of the Bushmen decides to carry the bottle to the end of the earth and throw it off.
The film also has several subplots, involving a bumbling microbiologist who collects animal dung; a female journalist who gives up a high-pressure job in Johannesburg to become a school teacher in the bush, and a band of incompetent revolutionaries.
"It's just a slapstick comedy, with no message," says Mr Jamie Uys (pronounced Ace), the then 63-year-old South African director (he died in 1996, aged 74, in Johannesburg), but already in 1980 there were those who called the film patronizing to the bushmen and presenting racial stereotypes while ignoring discrimination in South Africa. The film was even picketed by anti-apartheid groups.
"I don't think the film is patronizing," Mr Uys said. '"When the bushman is with us in the city, I do patronize him, because he's stupid. But in the desert, he patronizes me, because I'm stupid and he's brilliant." "The thing about this film", he added, "is that everybody's funny, whether white, black or brown. When you make a comedy, you like to see the funny side of the human condition, and you don't see their colour."
The film's original release in Afrikaans was dubbed into English, and my DVD has six language options and twenty sub-title options, including Arabic, Hindi, Hungarian, and Icelandic. I would've loved to have watched it in its original to find out how much Afrikaans I could still understand, but in whatever language or with what sub-titles you watch it, it' truly a gift from the comedy GODS!
P.S. Jamie Uys made altogether twenty-two films, including "Dingaka" and "Dirkie" or "Lost in the Desert", of which I shall write a blog at some other time. Right now I'm off to the indoor warm-water pool followed by my annual "Health assessment for people aged 75 years and older" paid for by the government. It's worth a few hundred dollars to my GP who deputises it to an ageing nurse - who may be more in need of it than I am - who asks me a series of YES-or-NO questions. It's a total waste of time and government money but probably not as wasteful as spending several hundred BILLION dollars on three nuclear-powered submarines which will only arrive years after my health has turned to rigor mortis.
P.P.S. I've just checked my.gov.au and found that those few YES-or-NO questions earned my GP $295.90 courtesy of the Australian government.
