With her 2017 directorial debut “I Am Not a Witch,” Rungano Nyoni established herself as a filmmaker worth paying attention to. Her follow-up, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” cemented her status as one of the most notable filmmakers currently telling African stories.
The film, which debuted in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, tells the story of a Zambian woman who reckons with the ways that her traditional upbringing and her family’s willingness to bury dark secrets has shaped her. The film, which Nyoni both wrote and directed, stars Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, and Henry B.J. Phiri.
An official synopsis of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” reads, “On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family, in filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves.”
Following its Cannes debut, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival. Critics praised the film for sensitively handling the topic of generational clashes in traditional cultures without falling into predictable tropes.
“While sharply critical of how even the most cathartic aspects of Bemba’s matrilineal society have been hijacked by patriarchal Christian values, ‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ resists the temptation to pit one against the other in order to score easy points,” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his Cannes review. “On the contrary, this dreamlike but deeply unnerving film aspires to a much thornier dilemma, and to a dramatic question so difficult to answer that Nyoni can’t even ask it without cheating: How do you find the words to speak up against a tradition of silence?”
An A24 release, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” opens in theaters on Friday, March 7. Watch the trailer below.
