On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

With absurdist humour and playfully surrealist imagery, this disarmingly funny Cannes award-winner rages at a middle-class Zambian family’s shameful silence.

Shula is driving home from a costume party when she sees a dead body sprawled in the middle of the road. She realises it’s her Uncle Fred: the man who sexually abused her and her cousins Nsansa and Bupe as children. And they weren’t his only victims. However, in their middle-class family’s Bemba culture, nobody speaks ill of the dead. Instead, Shula and her cousins are reluctantly caught up in days of elaborate grieving rites, pressured to eulogise a terrible man and to keep the secret everyone quietly knows.

Rungano Nyoni follows her acclaimed directorial debut I Am Not a Witch (MIFF 2017) with another formally adventurous Zambian feminist social critique – this one winning the Best Director prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Here, the dark experimentalism of her first film is focused to devastating effect, building a story around the metaphor of an African bird whose screams warn of a predator. Weaving dreams, apparitions and even children’s television programs into the increasingly overwrought funeral rites, Nyoni makes the viewer ride out the woozy tonal shifts to evoke the upside-down experience of trying to process trauma in silence.

“Blending molasses-dark comedy with searing poetic realism to capture contemporary Zambian society at a generational impasse between staunch tradition and social progress, this is palpably new, future-minded filmmaking.” – Variety