An empty soda bottle is tossed from a plane and lands among a family of Bushmen in the Kalihari. A journalist (Sandra Prinsloo) grows tired of being told to only run happy stories of no substance in the paper and takes a teaching position in Botswana. A Communist guerilla and his men are on the run after their attempt to assassinate the president and his cabinet fails.
With the way my coworker described the movie, I expected it was about the Bushmen and the soda bottle. That they'd find many different uses for it, but the desire to have it would cause great strife among them. The movie dispenses with that in the first 10 minutes, at which point Xi (N!xau, and that's how IMDb writes his name, so I'm going with it) decides that if the gods won't take this evil thing back, he'll carry it to the edge of the world and throw it away. That quest ultimately brings him into contact with the other two threads.
The movie plays out like slapstick comedy at several points. A local ecologist (Marius Weyers) is sent to pick the teacher up in a Land Rover that isn't finished being repaired yet. It has no brakes, and he's told he won't be able to get the vehicle started again if the engine dies. So the journey has extended gags of him hopping out to open a gate, but the vehicle starts rolling back downhill, and he has to chase it while trying to chock the wheels with rocks or hop in to drive it back to the gate. These sequences have no dialogue, just goofy sound effects, and the film is sped up. The would-be assassins roll up on the presidential building and stop so quickly one of the guys is flung off the front of the jeep (lot of car-based gags.) When they kick open the doors to the cabinet meeting, the doors bounce off the walls and slam shut in their faces.
Combined with the unseen person narrating all the parts where Xi is involved - because almost no one speaks his language - it also feels like one of those Goofy shorts, where he'd try to demonstrate how to build your own barbecue or get physically fit and it was a complete disaster.
Speaking of disaster, the ecologist is smitten with the schoolteacher, but becomes a complete doofus around women. He can't decide whether to shake her hand or not, he starts tripping over himself, he tackles her to the ground to save her from a rhino he hears coming. Except she never sees the rhino, so she figures he's just a pervert. The actors sell it; Weyers seems like he just wants to crawl in a hole and die as he keeps fucking up, while Prinsloo alternates between confusion and deep concern that she's alone in the savanna with a man who is possibly not well in the head.
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