One of my favorite films from this year’s New York Film Festival was Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch follow-up On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes 2024 in its Un Certain Regard section, shared with Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, I’ve been waiting to see if A24’s original December release would stick for the film but after adding Queer and The Brutalist to their plate, they’ve shifted to the less busy March 2025 timeframe (specifically March 7) and have now debuted the new trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family, in filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves.”
Michael Frank said in his review, “Nyoni’s film becomes a mixture of rage and tackling of Zambian burial rites, a clear-eyed look at the impossibility of these situations for the abused, the affected, the broken. But Shula often doesn’t seem broken. She’s strong, stoic, and often much quieter than those around her. She cares for Nsansa and a young cousin who’s clearly been a victim of her uncle’s horrific actions. Chardy embodies this character with a near-silent anger, a simmering frustration with the systems that push her uncle to the forefront of the community and blame everyone else. Among them are an overwhelmed teenage wife who is constantly compromising, nodding her head to help those who won’t admit her uncle’s wrongdoings, forced to watch while someone who assaulted her be recognized for a local hero. Chardy gives one of the performances of the year in one of the films in a year; I just hope audiences seek it out.”
See the trailer below.
