On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

After encountering her uncle’s dead body in the middle of an empty street Shula meets with her aunties, who have gathered for the funeral preparations. “You don’t even look traumatised, you seem fine,” they chastise her. They couldn’t be more wrong. In Rungano Nyoni’s surreal vision of middle-class Zambia, where rows of bunk beds in a college dorm are draped in plastic, scorned relatives are made to sleep in an empty swimming pool, and mourners wail in the darkness of a power outage, Shula is outwardly calm and sensible, even when sporting her glittering helmet. She does not so much as cry. But her placid expression belies the turmoil beneath the surface, which begins to crack as the family arrives and her own buried memories return. These include a segment from a children’s television program about the guinea fowl, a colourful bird that warns other animals when a predator is near. But is the danger in the past, buried with the dead, or still present, among those who protect their secrets? Though mostly shot at night, ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL builds to a nightmarish climax that takes place in the full and terrible light of day. (Genevieve Yue)

Rungano Nyoni: 20 QUESTIONS (2009, K), MWANSA, THE GREAT (2012, K), KUUNTELE (2014, K), I AM NOT A WITCH (2017)