JunkDror

Cultural ignorance and chauvinist incompetencies are universal observances, but this Zambian lens in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) leaves you astutely uncomfortable, dispirited, and enraged. Whilst director Rungano Nyoni presents her new film in a beautifully energizing style of filmmaking, she still gravely discusses themes of sexual abuse, grief, and tradition with an emotion so intense it should present one prerequisite before watching it: a trigger warning. 

Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving down a lonely, moonlit road wearing a bedazzled mask and listening to a catchy tune you bump your head to, when she pans out the window to notice her Uncle Fred (Roy Chisha) laying dead on the ground. Unmoved and stoic, she gets a hold of her father to relay the news. Like any deadbeat dad with successful children and an addiction to a “good time,” he doesn’t care to rush over to help, but finds the audacity to ask Shula for money. In an advanced state of inebriation, Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) arrives and seems more amused than anything to see Uncle Fred in such an undignified place to drop lifeless: just down the road from a brothel, carrying with him a reputation of perversion that makes her sentiments all the more appropriate.

In truth, Shula should’ve driven past Uncle Fred the moment she saw him and let the next car on the road deal with it! But she is better than us, just as she is within her own family. A respectable and compassionate figure, Shula is like our older sister: the first-born daughter doomed to carry the brunt of generational trauma, but a strong and resilient familial pillar. Thanks to Susan Chardy, whose acting debut in this film won her Best Breakthrough Performance at the British Independent Film Awards (2024), Shula’s anchoring role at home is portrayed with an honorable dignity and unwavering exhaustion that is held up by a lethargic people-pleasing routine and a semi-permanent poker face. 

Yes, she is an independent, working woman with a nice car who parties with her friends and can leave her house to stay at a hotel on a whim. We assume she has crafted a comfortable life for herself, one that is promised by a capitalist work ethic and that leads to sitting at the business table with white men (or “your people” as her cousin Nsansa calls them). But all these opportunities come from an accumulation of labor and decisiveness. Like us, what Shula doesn’t get to choose is the lineage she is born into: a new generation of Zambians, a culture known for its strong sense of community and patriarchal norms. Despite her established sense of individuality and autonomy, her uncle’s funeral proceedings call her to revisit and reinstate the collectivist qualities of her culture–almost at the flip of a switch. It is a subconscious adjustment that Shula knows well but seems emotionally disconnected from as she silently bares through the piercing whales of sorrow for a man she utterly disgusts and waitresses the men in “mourning” who could never imagine a world where they serve themselves their own plate of food. 

Still, the plight of Shula’s predetermined sequential birth might just be the last thing that exasperates you in the film. On Becoming A Guinea Fowl tells a story many women alike live. That is, the paralyzing suffering brought about by sexual abuse; a silence so suffocating and viscerally disabling you either exclaim its extremities in complete vulnerability or pretend it was a dream and bury the secret with you. From Nsansa’s revelation of her abuse, animated by a drunken hysterical laughter, to Shula’s detachment with her aunts’ indifferent bystanderism, Nyoni presents a film about indiscreet indecency and passive concern, both helping the grinning predators walk away free–or in this case, escape scrutiny and accountability through death.  Most of all, Nyoni refuses to grant us a resolution in a brutal, yet honest commentary to the cynical nature of trauma, especially within communities that subject wounded women to noiselessly agonize. We are left stranded in helplessness, just as her characters endure the emotional burden of familial obligation and the haunting pains of sexual exploitation without redemption. 

While resilience is admirable, it is equally tragic when you realize it blooms from a continuous loss of agency. It is an uncomfortable truth that often festers in the silence of complicity and heartbreakingly, in the intensity of community. Though On Becoming a Guinea Fowl explains such devastating life experiences may not be fatal, it is most definitely always violent.