On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Here lies Shula’s uncle Fred — dead in the middle of an empty road. It’s late, but Shula knows her family will expect her to wait with his body, no matter how much she might resent it. Bemba funerals are for the living, and the family will have questions. With the days-long ceremony beginning immediately, the blithe and unperturbed Shula — played by Susan Chardy in her debut film role — attempts to opt out of the haunted proceedings. But in this household, mourning is not optional. Tradition dictates that visitors will soon gather while relatives fill the family home with wails of grief. And what will they say about the dry-eyed and resolutely emotionless Shula?

Surely the dead can’t take all their secrets to the grave, and Fred, in particular, had many. Attempting to escape the inquisition of her heartbroken aunts, Shula is drawn to her cousins. Layered somewhere within the flurry of caring for each other, the whispered memories of this middle-class Zambian family will find a new frequency. In misery’s company, Shula will find a new voice.

In the long-awaited follow-up to her widely acclaimed debut I Am Not a Witch (TIFF ’17), visionary Zambian Welsh auteur Rungano Nyoni returns to the Festival with a fearless parable about the toll family secrets take on their keepers and the complicated costs of speaking up. Moulding her darkly comedic surrealist signature through the reverent cinematography of David Gallego (TIFF ’15’s Embrace of the Serpent, I Am Not a Witch), Nyoni’s hypnotically fresh perspective will leave audiences unsure whether to laugh, shout, or cry.

NATALEAH HUNTER-YOUNG

Content advisory: mature themes, coarse language