Safari - True/False Film Fest

Safari

A hunting we will go, as master Ulrich Seidl escorts us to Namibia, accompanied by a retro, Austrian family.
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Runtime: 1:30
In-person: Editor Andrea Wagner
Fest Year: 2017
Austrian master Ulrich Seidl turns his steely gaze on a hunters’ lodge in Namibia, where he finds his countrymen participating in a pathetic colonialist fantasy. With the aid of skilled guides, a family of pale-faced, khaki-donning Europeans hunts majestic animals. Impalas, zebras, and more meet their end in this carefully rigged sport, their carcasses then polished and proudly placed in the family home. To his great credit, Seidl doesn’t allow us to smugly judge this spectacle from a distance. Rather, with skin-crawling intensity (and the occasional jolt of pitch-black humor), he forces us to viscerally wrestle with the system in which the hunters operate. Plays with “Describe What You Heard,” an ingenious provocation about our country’s gun violence epidemic from Jason Tippet (Only the Young) and Joe Callander (“Tina Delivers a Goat”). (CB)