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When A24 came aboard to distribute Rungano Nyoni’s latest film, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” the director was a little wary.
“A24 is such a brand — and brands always frighten me,” she says over Zoom from an office space in Zambia where she stationed herself so she could get a good Wi-Fi signal for our interview. “And also Americans really scare me. It’s really intense.”
She was also wondering why the company would want to get on board with a film from her country.
“They hadn’t done African films,” says Nyoni, 42, in her British-inflected accent. “I was like, ‘Why do they want to do an African film?’ I was just very suspicious all the time. Normal people are happy about these things. But then I start thinking about: What are the consequences? What does this mean? Do they want a kidney? What is their style? I remember I was saying to my team, ‘I don’t think my film is very cool.’”
For what it’s worth, Nyoni’s film is very cool, even though she constantly peppers her conversation with this kind of playful self-deprecation. Even as an outsider, you can understand why A24 would sign on. Nyoni made a splash in 2017 with her critically acclaimed first feature, “I Am Not a Witch,” a blistering comic satire also set in Zambia about a young girl accused of witchcraft.
Her second act, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” which arrives in theaters Friday, doubles down on her artistic vision, further solidifying Nyoni as one of the preeminent voices of today’s African cinema. She is now afforded a global platform few filmmakers from the continent receive.
Surreal and at times bracingly funny, the new movie follows Shula (Susan Chardy), who we first encounter driving home from a costume party on a dark and quiet road. (She’s wearing the same look Missy Elliott had in her video for “The Rain,” sparkly mask included.) There, Shula comes across the corpse of her Uncle Fred, lying in the gutter. After alerting the police and her family to the mysterious death, Shula is roped into the local mourning traditions.
Slowly, though, you come to realize just what kind of man Fred was through the distressed faces of Shula and her other younger relatives. He was a serial sexual assaulter, a fact that is glossed over in the performative grieving of others. The movie premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Nyoni won the directing prize in the Un Certain Regard section.
“Being an African film is not easy because you don’t have funding from Africa,” Nyoni says. “So you have to have dual identities that sometimes it benefits for you to be African cinema, at times it benefits you to be something else. When we were going to Cannes, for example, there was a whole big debate about, ‘This film is not Zambian.’ I said, ‘But it’s Zambian.’ They were like, ‘No, it has to be British.’”
Nyoni felt like part of her identity was being denied. (Cannes ended up listing the film as being from Zambia, the United Kingdom and Ireland.)
Though she didn’t want to take seven years to make a follow-up to “I Am Not a Witch,” Nyoni says she needed time to recover from the experience.
“It was harrowing,” she recalls, a feeling that was related to “having to prove yourself” to financiers. But she adds that her set specifically posed a unique challenge given the “cultural differences” between working with a Zambian crew and a British one.
“I think film sets are a mini representation of what can happen in the world, and it can get ugly,” she says. “That’s the nicest way I can put it. You see how people put themselves in a hierarchy and lower others.” She found that the Zambian crew “probably suffered under that also because they are taken less seriously, and that I found really difficult.”
Having a foot in both African and European worlds, however, is in many ways what has defined Nyoni’s life and career. Born in Zambia, her family left for Cardiff in Wales when she was about 9. Attending the University of Birmingham, where she initially studied business, she became entranced with Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher.”
“I watched this film a million times because I’m thinking: What magic is this, that I can be so involved with this unlikable woman?” Nyoni remembered. “I loved her, someone so different to me — that’s power. I thought it was coming from Isabelle Huppert. I was like, she’s great, I want to be like her. She did that thing to me. But then, of course, it’s Haneke. It’s everything. If I could do that for African cinema, people are just not connected to your world and then have them connect, I think that would be, for me, an amazing achievement.”
While her films can be quite critical of Zambian society, Nyoni herself has a “romantic” conception of the place. Around four months ago she returned to live there with her partner and her 3-year-old daughter; she wanted her kid to grow up in the same place she did. Nyoni also still cares for Maggie Mulubwa, the now-16-year-old actor who starred in “I Am Not a Witch.”
She jokes that she has relocated after every film. After “I Am Not a Witch” she went to Portugal. Still, it was Zambia — and a personal loss — that served as the inspiration for “Guinea Fowl.”
About three years ago, her grandmother died and the director came home for the funeral. Her great-uncle had issued a mandate from his village that they would not mourn his sister’s death in typical Zambian fashion: No one would sleep over at the house; no one would wail in sorrow. That left Nyoni with downtime since she didn’t have to cater to anyone. Still, she was restless. When she finally did sleep a bit, she had a dream that was “basically Shula’s story in its very skeletal form.”
“I woke up and I went to my living room and started writing it out,” she says.
Nyoni loved her grandmother, just as she loved her uncle who had died not long before. But that love is what provoked her to make a film in which the exact opposite is the case.
“When I was mourning my uncle, I remember turning to my partner and saying, ‘Imagine if you don’t love this person and you still have to do all this stuff.’”
In “Guinea Fowl,” the funeral rituals are tedious. The women in Shula’s family have to both cook and clean for all the guests and are chided when they are not appropriately sad. All the while, the stress is augmented by the fact that the man whose life has ended caused a pain that has rippled through generations. Guinea fowl, small birds that can take down predators while working in groups, become an apt metaphor for the way the women bond together, as well as a haunting visual motif. (The film even includes a sidebar featuring an educational children’s TV show, describing the creature.)
Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Nyoni also infuses the film with dark humor, whether it’s Shula’s drunk cousin twerking on her car or that Missy Elliott outfit.
“The tone is really important to me,” Nyoni explains. “Sometimes it verges on: Am I trying to provoke people? You’re trying to find the right balance. In funerals, a lot of funny, absurd things happen that I’ve witnessed. Like, people will mourn and then be on their phones.”
Nyoni understands that her films can give people the wrong impressions about how she feels about Zambia. She heard that people at a festival in Zimbabwe were offended by “Guinea Fowl.”
“Then I started playing my film in my head, like, oh, yeah, it does look offensive. It looks like I am really laughing at Zambian culture,” she says. “I think people were just conflating.”
Sometimes her intentionally far-fetched embellishments don’t register for audiences outside of her own country. “Literally, audience members thought we tie women to trucks, right?” the director remembers of an early reaction to “I Am Not a Witch” at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And I thought, what have I done? I’m adding to this nonsense of what people think about Africa.”
She knows she can only be responsible for what she creates but also is still wrestling with how to present her world. “My biggest fight, more than reiterating stereotypes or cliches, is I am more afraid of dumbing down or watering down my culture for people just to make them understand it,” she says. “I think I need to find a balance of contextualizing it without thinking like I’m patronizing people.”
For her future projects, Nyoni hopes to expand her horizons. She has another film in development set in Zambia, but also a movie with “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins’ company Pastel that would shoot in Europe and a sci-fi project set in Botswana. She is intimidated by the sci-fi idea because it would require a lot of visual post work, which she says “scares” her. She almost wishes she could go back to school to learn how to do special effects.
“That’s what happens after you make your first film or your second,” she says. “It ruins the illusion that you can do anything.”
But anything is exactly what she has achieved. Charmingly, Nyoni adds, “I’m neurotic anyway.” Her modesty and nerves feel genuine.
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