On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (in-person & online)

Elizabeth Chisela, Henry B.J. Phiri, Susan Chardy

In On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni affirms the strengths of her debut I Am Not a Witch, and adds to them new layers of focus, imagination and righteousness, in a slow-burn drama on family trauma.

As the film begins, a woman is driving in the inky Zambian night, joyful and resplendent in fancy dress. Her car slows as she discovers a body on the road, the corpse of her uncle, Freddy. So begins several days of mourning for Shula (Susan Chardy), with her family insisting on a grand affair of a funeral. Yet Shula refuses to grieve, either in public ceremony or private emotion. As she is asked to store more family secrets, is heaped with ever greater duties and uncovers the truth of her uncle’s life, something stirs in her, stalking through the long grass and ready to warn of the predators that lurk there.

In Nyoni’s films, reality has a lightly shifting surface, where the past can rise up to swallow us at any time, aided by cinematographer David Gallego’s (Embrace of the Serpent) magical realist lens. Despite the flights of fantasy and formal invention, Guinea Fowl has a sensitivity and precision to the realities of family life, often resulting in a deeply mordant humour. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl manages to speak in incredibly clear, suitably angry, terms about why abuse occurs and the scars it leaves. Yet that clarity does not come at the sacrifice of the complexities of how we allow it to happen. A story of reclamation of power and the creation of new bonds of solidarity, it is one of the most sophisticated films to have emerged from the #MeToo era.