
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, this vibrant drama centers on a middle-class Zambian family as a mysterious death brings long-buried secrets to light. FREE!
Hop Film NowOn 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.
Nyoni's film centers on Shula (a furious and touching Susan Chardy), whose stoical response to finding her uncle's body on the street in the middle of the night hints at the many emotional fissures that will lead to the exposure of difficult truths long repressed. Balancing domestic realism and expressionistic absurdity with precision and constant surprise, Nyoni, in the follow-up to her feature debut, I Am Not a Witch, commandingly delineates the contours of a community caught between tradition and modernity. The film's compositional rigor, inventive sound design and unexpected narrative turns and digressions confirm Nyoni as a distinctive new voice in international cinema.
D: Rungano Nyoni, Zambia/UK/Ireland, subtitled, 2024, 1h38m
Content Warning: This film contains content related to sexual violence.

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Black Family Visual Arts Center
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