On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Viewer Advice: Contains themes of suicide and child sexual abuse.
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
Tickets
For information about the accessible services being offered at MIFF, please visit miff.com.au/access. If you require any access service, such as wheelchair/step-free access, for any MIFF session, please call 03 8660 4888 or email boxoffice@miff.com.au to book your ticket.
You might also like ...
As the restitution conversation gains global momentum, this striking Berlinale Golden Bear–winning documentary follows a stolen statue home.
Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker’s debut film is a sublime mother–daughter coming-of-ager that pays extraordinary attention to the ordinary.
Like a visual poem, this ode to a Black woman’s joys and tragedies in the Deep South is rendered exquisitely tactile on the big screen.