ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
In 2017, Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s stunning debut feature I Am Not a Witch followed the story of a little girl called Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) who is sent to a witch camp, the powers of which she has been falsely accused powers leading to her being exploited by a corrupt local government official. In Nyoni’s highly anticipated sophomore feature On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, we meet – again – a central character called Shula (Susan Chardy). Now a young woman, that both these characters have the same name might implicitly suggest a kind of informal connection, if not a direct sequel.
But of course, our two Shulas are not the same – the girl in I Am Not a Witch is an orphan, while the life of Shula in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marked very much by the overbearing presence of both her immediate and extended family. But even putting the significance of the central characters name to the side, Shula and Shula regardless still have much in common. They may not literally be the same character at different points of her life, but they are similar enough for us to identify a strong pattern in the kinds of women Nyoni wants to tell stories about. Both largely silent, Shula and Shula are observers forced to become participants, and who both see potential liberation from their exploitation by powerful men and the communities that support them through the fantastic possibility of turning into an animal – a goat in Nyoni’s first movie, and the eponymous Guinea Fowl in her second.
In the case of the latter, structuring flashbacks to a children’s television show that Shula remembers from her childhood informs us that guinea fowl are akin to mother nature’s alarm system; in the context of the African savanna, they emit a curious, distinctive sound to warn other animals in their vicinity of a nearby, impending threat. That this particular animal – and its special role – is so central to Shula’s story lies at the heart of Nyoni’s film, an intriguing concoction that can in this sense be best conceived as a part social realist drama and part beast fable.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl begins as Shula drives home one evening from a party, dressed impeccably as Missy Elliot from the iconic 1997 music video for The Rain. Shula stops when she sees a dead body on the road, who happens to be her Uncle Freddy. Joined by her charming (although obviously drunk) cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), the two young women wait in Shula’s car for the police to arrive the next morning to take the body away. As their extended family gather for the elaborate Zambian mourning ritual, the ugly truth about who Uncle Freddy actually was comes to the surface as the younger women witness the horrific mistreatment of his young widow by their own family. In light of these revelations that she can no longer ignore, Shula turns to a totem animal to help her find her voice.
Playing in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with On Becoming a Guinea Fowl Nyoni demonstrates that the majesty of I Am Not a Witch was no one-off fluke. A wholly original filmmaker whose creative vision remains unparalleled, this is a hell of a movie, where – once again – her Zambian and Welsh heritage form the folkloric basis of a film that somehow is both distinctly African and familiarly western. The world is not kind to Nyoni’s protagonists, young women forced to live in communities largely dismissive of their safety and autonomy. And yet – through her signature introduction of the fantastic into their brutal worlds – there is, importantly, always hope. It is precisely this which elevates Nyoni’s films to something almost bordering on the spiritually divine. No one makes films like her – right now, they don’t even come close.
