Richard Wicksteed

ABOUT DIRECTOR RICHARD WICKSTEED

Richard Wicksteed started off as a South African journalist involved in anti-apartheid reportage for press and radio. In exile in Zimbabwe in the 1980s he turned to documentary filmmaking and actuality reportage covering southern African liberation struggles, ecological and development issues and African cultural heritage.

After returning from exile he worked on current affairs, expose reportage and began focussing on First Peoples issues in southern Africa.

Richard’s passion to give expression to African hunter-gatherer and nomadic cultures, and to uncover the dispossession and oppression of First Peoples, are the driving forces behind a number of his documentary films.

Richard’s documentary films covering San/Bushman themes include Iindawo ZikaThixo/In God’s Places (1996) on the San/Bushman shamanic and cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg; Death of A Bushman (2004, with Stef Snel), about the murder by police of legendary Kalahari San tracker Optel Rooy; Bushman’s Secret (2006, with Rehad Desai), on the exploitation of San medicinal knowledge by the pharmaceutical sector; The Will To Survive (2008) on San history and current situation across southern Africa; My Land is My Dignity (2008) on the San land rights struggle in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve; and his work appears in the films on display the Origins Centre at the University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg.

Richard is currently in post-production on A Bushman Odyssey, which chronicles the dispossession, exile and return to the Kgalagadi wilderness of the legendary Kruiper Bushman family over four generations, from the German-Nama War of 1908 to the present.

Richard is also developing a slate of screenplays set in southern Africa. Details on request.

“Richard Wicksteed is a cinematographer and director whose films are passionate and compassionate, visually intriguing, voicing unspoken issues, and humane to the bone.”
– Taku Kaskela, Head of Film & TV division, University of the Witwatersrand.