Time Hunter
ABOUT
TIME HUNTER is a speculative documentary, blending verité with cyberpunk-inspired fiction. The film follows Mark Mushiva, a 34-year-old Namibian hip hop artist and creative technologist living in Berlin. As Mushiva struggles to support himself and his family back home, everyday life is interwoven with reveries from his vivid imagination where we meet his cyber-punk alias, Mark Question, a revolutionary agent determined to help Black Africans build a technological utopia and break free of neocolonialism. Born in a war camp in Angola during in the late 80s, Mushiva spent his post-apartheid childhood making sense of colonial trauma, racism, and war by getting lost within the worlds of sci-fi, comic books and video games. With a record deal in Norway and a PhD in Computer Science, life has taken Mushiva farther than his childhood self had ever imagined. As Mushiva and his alter-ego balance their conflicting desires, the intersection of science fiction and reality becomes the fertile cinematic landscape to reflect the promises and shortcomings of our social order. Embracing Mushiva’s layered performances invites us to contemplate our own coping mechanisms, technology as the new frontier of imperialism and domination, and the potential for speculative myth-making to create a better world.
Mark Mushiva is a street poet and hip-hop artist from Namibia. He is one-third of award-winning hip-hop poetry trio Black Vulcanite. Mark was born in Lubango, Angola, where his parents were stationed as freedom fighters of the Namibian liberation struggle. His political upbringing informs much of his rap and poetry while contemporary influences of anime, skateboarding, hip-hop, and '80s cyberpunk are also themes Mark exploits to add a unique cultural nuance to his work. In light of the radical shifts in cultural and socio-economic factors, Mark states that his current body of work seeks to represent the emergent multicultural consciousness of Namibian youth.
Daniel Chein is an independent filmmaker whose work explores transculturalism in the performative. His latest short film "About a Home" (co-directed with Elizabeth Lo) had its world premiere at the 2021 Slamdance Film Festival and is distributed by Argo. His previous film "Basha Man" premiered at CAAMFest2017, where it won the AT&T Film Award. In 2019, Daniel was a Flaherty Seminar Fellow, and his work has received support from ITVS, Sundance Institute, Princess Grace Foundation, BAVC, Points North Institute, SFFILM, UnionDocs, and Berkeley Film Foundation. As a lecturer, Daniel has taught courses on cinematography, editing, and documentary filmmaking. He received a BA in Anthropology and an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University. "Time Hunter" is his debut feature film.
CREDITS
Daniel Chein
