A documentary by Simon Stadler. In Ju/’hoan, German, and Italian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

“They’re nice, but so different!” So says a Ju/’hoansi Bushman, talking candidly about foreigners who come to experience a ritualized version of their daily lives. Eventually, a bunch of the locals leave Africa to gawk at Europeans in their own native habitats.

Over a breezy 85 minutes, Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi upends our notion of what “normal” might be. To begin with, the Ju/’hoansi people of Namibia are already displaced at home, with their nomadic hunting practices banned by the government for more than a quarter-century now. Consequently, they have turned themselves into cultural-tourism entrepreneurs making their old ways visible to safari-trekkers, some of whom show relatively sincere interest.

The favour, if that’s what it is, is returned by the villagers, partially through the ministrations of first-time docmaker Simon Stadler, who follows a group of particularly philosophical and linguistically adventurous villagers from outback Namibia to his native Germany and then on to Italy, where they become the curious travellers.

The interactions that follow, whether accidental or planned, hew to a rather repetitive structure, with the outgoing Chau and his more skeptical wife, Kxore—who speak an unusually percussive tongue—finding much fish-out-of-water humour among the inhabitants of the chilly, largely Caucasian places they call Ghostland.

It would be good if Stadler were able to delve deeper into their imperilled microculture. But this mutual introduction does offer an unusually positive window onto human adaptability, suggesting what we still have to learn from each other—despite our most dedicated efforts not to.