Hollywood Finds a New Set In Vast Desert of Namibia

[q]NAMIB DESERT, Namibia -- The blonde in the cowboy hat stepped forward with slow, swaggering menace, her boots crunching audibly on the sand below. As the camera zoomed tight on her green zombie eyes, the desert beyond completed the scene with the kind of bleached-out desolation no Hollywood studio could provide.

And though the eyes were fakes, the desolation was real. "GallowWalker," a zombie-infested western, is being shot in remote corners of the Namib Desert, a vast sea of undulating sand and stone that has joined the growing ranks of popular African filming locations.

"It's fantastic! Just look! It's beautiful!" Henner Hofmann, the director of photography, marveled as he set the cameras for a tricky shot in which fake boulders and stuntmen tumble noisily down a steep, pale-orange rock face. "Namibia offers that clean air and extreme distance in the view because pollution is almost nothing."

The Namib is not the only location in Africa bewitching filmmakers. From the slums of Kenya to the once-genocidal streets of Rwanda to the villages of Mozambique, Hollywood has embraced Africa -- as a place to shoot films and as a source of fresh dramatic themes.

"GallowWalker," starring Wesley Snipes as a gunslinger taunted by a posse of his former victims returned from the dead, will include no explicit references to Africa and is unlikely to find its way onto any Oscar short lists. But many films shot recently in Africa have won critical acclaim and turned the gaze of pop culture to issues little noticed by most Westerners, such as the destructive illegal gems trade dramatized in "Blood Diamond," starring Leonardo DiCaprio.