The editor’s note: This review was originally published in 2024 Kanes Film Festival. A24 opens ”When you become a guinea bird“In theaters Friday 7 March 2025.
Decades of mediocre Sundance Movies – and Some very goodAlso – have conditioned us to expect certain things from culturally specific drama about young people who return home from the big city and are struggling to combine modern identity with family tradition. These characters always feel in violation of the inheritance that falsified them, just to discover something important and deep about the past they were so quick to leave behind. At the end of the story, they return to their rapid lives in London or LA or anywhere with a new sense of self-crew-that reflects the grace and strength they have inherited from the generations that came in front of them.
Story The Nont’s Lucid and unpleasantly furious “becoming a guinea bird” is a stiff middle finger to such a wishful thinking. Located in a middle-class Zambian suburb located at a well-operated but poorly maintained intersection between global influence and bemba-mores, tells “I am not a witch” film creator’s second feature of a Western woman who is forced to keep her extended family tree together with her roots during a crisis that leaves her desire to tear to the whole of the crisis leaving her desire to demolish all of what is forced to keep her extended family trees together by her roots during a crisis leaving her desire to tear down all what is forced to keep her extended family tree together by her roots during a crisis leaving her desire to tear all the Family trees together of her roots during a crisis that leaves her desire to rip with this earth with her bare.
There are moments of beauty and resilience that are in the midst of the buried pain that she reveals on the road, but do not be fooled by the hero’s zoom meetings with her British co -worker or her sad preference for American life -hack podcast: The future may not have all the answers, but it is the past that she will not be able to forgive. That leads us to another fascinating way that Nyoni manages to undermine one of the recent cinema’s most calcified sub -genres: the protagonist’s family can be her greatest connection to her cultural memory, but their eagerness to forgive the past in the end demands that they forget it.
Although it is sharply critical of how even the most cathartic aspects of Bemba’s matrilineal society have been cut by patriarchal Christian values, “on becoming a Guinea bird” resists the temptation to apply to the other to get simple points. On the contrary, this dream -like but deeply unnecessary film strives for a very thorny dilemma and to a dramatic question so hard to answer that Nyoni cannot even ask It without cheating: How do you find the words to speak against a tradition of silence?
Silence seems to be a natural response to Shula (a stoic but shocking Susan Chardy). It is her first reaction when she finds her uncle Fred’s body, which is in the middle of the road when she drives back from a costume party in a friend’s house. His corpse lies down the street from a brothel, and under a sign ad for a priest who promises miracles and liberation. It is possible that Shula hesitates because of how absurd it would look if she called the police while she is dressed in a parachute and a disco -ball headgear, but the stunned depth of Shulas silently suggests a more serious kind of dilemma.
Your first guess will probably be that Uncle Fred did something horrible for Shula when she was a child, and your first guess will probably be right. Less obvious to us – at least until Shula’s drunk cousin Nssa (Elizabeth Chela) shows up on stage with a similar lack of concern – is that she may not have been his only victim.
In retrospect, the ugly truth may have been obvious to Shula as well, but it seems that this is the first time she has allowed herself to admit it. And so Shula has to count on the full extent of Uncle Fred’s crime while allowing her home to become a temporary shrine in his memory. Dozens of women from her large family spill into the kitchen on their hands and knees – because “death comes crawling” – while their men are sitting outside waiting to be fed. Uncle Fred’s worrying young widow takes shelter in a room upstairs, just for the ultramilitant sister of the deceased to demand everyone to deny any charity to a woman who failed to keep peace alive and in good health. In addition, Shula’s aunt will insist that her family grabs the ownership of the widow’s house, and possibly her children with it.
Nyoni illustrates the finer points in the Bemba community’s grief process through a hard flattering light, as Uncle Fred’s sister requires satisfaction from every potential moment of grace. So do the men in Shula’s family, who stick to the film’s periphery but still manage to exercise their will (an extension of the podium that Uncle Fred manages to throw over this story from life after life). They sit around the outer ring on Isambo Lyamfwa – A large meeting intended for mourners to clear the air between them and let the dead resign in peace – and turn it into a hostile takeover of Uncle Frank’s assets.
It is just one of many ways that Shula’s family manages to perverse the beauty of their customs. Bemba culture believes that all people are born good, and that only their goodness should remember after they have passed; A nice thought that can be hit a little differently for anyone who cannot forget about the deceased’s tackiness quite so easily.
Shula has too many companies in that category, and “on becoming a guinea fowl” is on her most arresting self -conflicted when she discovers that her trauma is more split than her frustration over keeping it secret. This discovery hangs on Shula’s younger cousinbupe, a college student whose ability to try suicide one night and sports a body -sized smile the next speaks of how reluctant peace’s victims are to interfere with the family’s order, just as it crystallizes why they were the ones he chose to focus on. “He’s dead now, so it’s ok,” smiles Bupe, as if she actually believes in it, but we don’t have to see one of the film’s clumsy dream sequences to recognize her self -deception.
Some of Nyoni’s techniques may be uncomfortably easy for the weight they are supposed to bear, especially those who betray a lack of belief in the Hane-like glaze of her framing, and its ability to break real horror from things of domestic sterility. The half -frequency appearance of Shula’s younger I feel like a revelation from a minor story about this story, too neatly illustrates the presence of the past, while the climate scene that gives the feeling of the film’s title emphasizes the occasional link between the power of Nyoni’s metaphors and the clumsiness of their execution.
At the same time, however, several of her fattest choices are in the same way decisive for the film’s ultimate force. The most breathtaking passage of all begins with the sound of Bupe’s suicide video, just for a simple change in perspective to devastating homes that the women in Shula’s family have learned to say nothing, otherwise they would all speak in harmony.
“Stay quiet,” warns Shula’s mom. She insists that it is in favor of the family. But how many people have to keep a secret before hiding the truth becomes more disturbing than lighting it? There is no simple equation to calculate it, but “to become a guinea fowl” invites Shula to make mathematics in its most influencing moments – to add the ages for Uncle Fred’s children, or count the number of women gathering in pantry so that they can sing together as one.
These are opportunities for new injuries and much-needed healing, but they are never sweet enough to hide the cruelty that inspired them to be, never cathartic enough to set the perfect indie-pop song and send all homes with a little Hardwon new strength. They burn like a flame that has too much ignition to ever be extinguished on their own, and the scar power in Nyoni’s film ignites from Shula’s possible insight that she would rather torch her family to the ground than letting them forget what happened. After all, what is tradition if not a shared memory?
Rating: B+
“When he became Guinea Fowl” premiered at the Film Festival 2024 Cannes. A24 releases it in theaters on Friday, March 7, 2025.
