Together with her 2017 directorial debut “I Am Not a Witch,” Rungano Nyoni established herself as a filmmaker value listening to. Her follow-up, “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl,” cemented her standing as one of the vital notable filmmakers at present telling African tales.
The movie, which debuted within the Un Sure Regard part of the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant, tells the story of a Zambian lady who reckons with the ways in which her conventional upbringing and her household’s willingness to bury darkish secrets and techniques has formed her. The movie, which Nyoni each wrote and directed, stars Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, and Henry B.J. Phiri.
An official synopsis of “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” reads, “On an empty highway in the course of the evening, Shula stumbles throughout the physique of her uncle. As funeral proceedings start round them, she and her cousins carry to mild the buried secrets and techniques of their middle-class Zambian household, in filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we inform ourselves.”
Following its Cannes debut, “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” screened on the 2024 Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant and New York Movie Pageant. Critics praised the movie for sensitively dealing with the subject of generational clashes in conventional cultures with out falling into predictable tropes.
“Whereas sharply crucial of how even probably the most cathartic elements of Bemba’s matrilineal society have been hijacked by patriarchal Christian values, ‘On Turning into a Guinea Fowl’ resists the temptation to pit one in opposition to the opposite so as to rating straightforward factors,” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his Cannes assessment. “Quite the opposite, this dreamlike however deeply unnerving movie aspires to a a lot thornier dilemma, and to a dramatic query so troublesome to reply that Nyoni can’t even ask it with out dishonest: How do you discover the phrases to talk up in opposition to a convention of silence?”
An A24 launch, “On Turning into a Guinea Fowl” opens in theaters on Friday, March 7. Watch the trailer under.