ABSTRACT
African film has always been entwined with ecology. This chapter analyzes Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, a science fiction film about land contestation and bio-extraction in South Africa; and Sarita Siegel and Gregg Mitman’s documentary The Land Beneath Our Feet, which focuses on land concessions in Liberia. Both films depict the exploitation of biological life and energy extraction from the continent. This preoccupation with depletion—of land, human labor, and nonhuman life—links both films. Even more, however, is each film’s insistence on the possibility of repair: in Blomkamp’s film, through renewable creative energy from waste; in Siegel and Mitman’s film, via a proposal for an alternative wild cinema. Wildness, in this usage, brims with potential; it is a marker of refusal and resistance. Bucking convention in its disposition toward the open commons, wild cinema names a process—from production through distribution to consumption—that is attentive to a variegated social ecology, attuned to the land, and generative of community relations. Wild cinema incarnates both cinematic and ecological freedom.
