Mier “The Ant”

The bleached Kalahari desert is the evocative setting for this short film, an Official Selection for the 2022 New York African Film Festival. Mier “The Ant” subtly explores the implications of diamond mining in the ancestral lands of the San (Bushmen). Boetie, a frustrated young man from the village where the San have been resettled, crosses paths in the desert with a San elder hunting Gemsbok in the traditional way, with poison arrows. The gun-wielding Boetie ignores the older man’s warning and sets out into the Kalahari’s diamond fields, which are posted with a stark warning to trespassers. There he has a stroke of good luck, but fortune swiftly turns against him as he becomes the hunted. Is Boetie running from himself, or from life in the settlement, which he had hoped to escape?