The film The Sending of the Crows, is part of a body of work based on narratives told in the Southern African San languages |xam and !xun that form part of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive. A testament to the lives and cultural practices of |xam and !xun people, the archive also provides a unique and rare insight into the impact of the Dutch colonization of South Africa. It is a collection of 13.000 pages of stories and interviews in notebooks, drawings, paintings and photographs of and by |xam and !xun people, collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1870s and 1880s. Folklore and personal accounts were told to them in |xam by several men called |a!kunta, ||kabbo, ≠kasin, Dia!kwain and |han≠kass’o, as well as a woman called !kweiten ta ||ken, and in !xun by four young boys called !nanni, Tamme, |úma and Da.

The film The Sending of the Crows retells the tragic legend told by Dia!kwain in the Southern African San language |xam in Cape Town in 1874, of three crows sent out by |xam women to find their husbands, only to learn that they have been killed by a Boer commando (Dutch colonial settlers). It is interwoven with a spoken word sound piece by South African singer and poet Janine Overmeyer aka Blaq Pearl, that reflects on another version of the same story told by !kweiten ta ||ken, in which the crow tells the stones that have buried the men to part and the men return home. Through animation and a rich soundscape, the film brings these narratives into the present, shedding light on the on the violence and legacy of Dutch colonialism in South Africa, as well as the resilience of the |xam people and their descendants.