Making good on I Am Not a Witch, her mesmerizing feature debut, writer-director Rungano Nyoni further interrogates the cultural traditions of Zambia with On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.
In the movie’s extended, dryly comic opening sequence, a young woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning from a costume party when she discovers the body of her uncle lying on the side of the road. Dressed like an Afrofuturist explorer, she surveys the scene with a blithe impassivity; when her (drunken) cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) happens by, she marks the occasion with jokes and dancing in front of Shula’s headlights. Meanwhile, a billboard looms over them depicting a pastor promising “Miracles. Healing & Deliverance.”
What follows is a multi-day mourning and funeral process involving Shula’s extended family, pockmarked with both Bemba and Christian traditions. Absurdities abound, as well as the slow revelation of dark secrets.
Nyoni nimbly manages the movie’s many tones, employing moments of magical realism—a few mysterious figures also appear during that opening sequence—as well as flashbacks to a children’s television show about animals. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl exists more securely in the corporeal world than I Am Not a Witch, but there is still the sense that magic is in the air, for both ill and good.
Chardy, in her acting debut, proves a steady anchor as Shula, serenely holding each frame. Indeed, the movie weds itself to Shula’s experience, taking a distanced perspective on the proceedings. Shula has both a generational and cultural distance—her work appears to take her outside of Zambia; in fact she may only be visiting—but there is also a psychological component to her skepticism, as well, one we discover as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl proceeds.
The music, by Lucrecia Dalt, also gets us inside Shula’s head; it sounds like a gathering storm, full of rumbles and faraway throbs. The movie eventually builds to a stormy confrontation, during which the camera shifts focus to notice another reckoning that is approaching in the background. It’s a bravura finale I wouldn’t dare detail further.
(3/11/2025)
