Time Hunter

Original Title: Time Hunter

Runtime: 90'

Expected Release: January 2027

Production Stage: Post-production

1st Feature: Yes

Looking for: Gap financing and co-production partners, sales agents, distributors, buyers, festivals, and collaborators across film, tech, XR, gaming, comics, museums and music spaces

Synopsis:

Time Hunter is a sci-fi documentary that blends verité and historical investigation with hip-hop and African Futurism. The film follows Mushiva, a creative technologist and musician, as he migrates to Berlin from Namibia, a former German colony. By day, he uses emergent technologies to investigate Germany’s colonial crimes in Namibia; by night, his music performances summon his alter ego – the Time Hunter, a speculative agitator on a quest to disrupt colonial forces across past, present, and future.

Directors’ Profiles:

Daniel Chein (Director, Writer, Producer) is an independent filmmaker based between Carpinteria and Taipei. Merging ethnographic inquiry, co-creation methodologies, and direct cinema, he is drawn to stories that reveal subtle social dynamics and expressions of diasporic longing in the performative. He has received support from the Princess Grace Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Sundance Institute, and his films have screened at festivals worldwide. His short film About A Home premiered at the 2021 Slamdance Film Festival and is distributed by Argo. His previous film Basha Man won the Student Film Award at CAAMFest. Featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Daniel is a 2023 Sundance Fellow, a 2024 Berlinale Talent, and a recipient of 2026 Creative Capital Award. He holds a BA in Anthropology and an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University, and has taught courses in cinematography, editing, and documentary filmmaking.

Mushiva (Director, Writer, Protagonist) is a multidisciplinary creative technologist, inventor, and hip-hop artist from Namibia. A research fellow with Forensic Architecture, he holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction and is a founding member of the award-winning hip-hop poetry group Black Vulcanite. His work integrates computer vision, sound synthesis, and robotics to project Afro-Accelerationist visions – the radical idea that technology’s embrace by African people can counteract racial capitalism. Born in a war camp in Lubango, Angola, where his parents served as freedom fighters during the Namibian liberation struggle, Mushiva’s political upbringing deeply informs his creative work. Influenced by critical race and post-colonial theory, cybernetics, and technology design, his recent project Turbo Summation combined manifesto, hip-hop album, music film, and homemade wearable instruments. Time Hunter is his feature film debut.

 

 

 

Producer’s Profile:

David Felix Sutcliffe is a UK-based Sundance and Emmy Award–winning producer whose films have been distributed by Netflix, Hulu, BBC, Canal+, PBS, and screened at Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, CPH:DOX, and True/False. His debut feature (T)ERROR (Netflix/BBC) won a Sundance Special Jury Prize, an Emmy Award, and an Independent Spirit Award nomination. His producing credits include Songs from the Hole (Netflix, SXSW premiere), For Our Children (Netflix, SFFILM premiere), For Venida, For Kalief (POV, Tribeca premiere), and 499 (Cinema Guild, Tribeca premiere). He has also served as a consulting producer on acclaimed documentaries including Crime + Punishment (Hulu, Sundance premiere) and Quest (POV, Sundance premiere). Sutcliffe is an alum of the Sundance Creative Producing Lab and Edit and Story Lab, a former Soros Equality Fellow and Pew Fellow, and recipient of the IDA’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker of the Year Award.

 

Co-Producers’ Profile:

Thomas Kaske is a Berlin-based producer with Seera Films whose work has premiered at leading festivals including Berlinale, IDFA, and DOK Leipzig. His producing credits include The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder by Inadelso Cossa (Berlinale Forum), Notes on Displacement by Khaled Jarrar (IDFA Envision Competition), As I Want by Samaher Alqadi (Berlinale Encounters), and Time Before Land by Juliane Henrich (DOK Leipzig). Born near Berlin, Kaske studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and later completed an MFA at Bauhaus University Weimar. Before moving into production, he worked with the MA Visual and Media Anthropology program at FU Berlin and directed experimental short films. He has worked as an independent producer since 2016.

Laura Kloeckner is a curator and film producer based in Berlin. She is a producer and partner at SEERA Films, a production company based in Berlin and Cairo. Her recent credits include Ancestral Visions of the Future by Lemohang Mosese (Berlinale). Previously, Laura worked with DOX BOX, an organization dedicated to supporting Arab/African documentary filmmakers, and built extensive expertise in the international documentary industry through her work with the Berlinale/EFM and DOK Leipzig. Since 2018, she has been a part of the Berlin-based art space SAVVY Contemporary – The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, where she co-curated exhibitions for Berlinale Forum Expanded. Laura serves as a senior consultant for the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE) and an EAVE Producer’s Workshop Alumni 2024.