Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and selected at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, celebrated Zambian Welsh writer-director Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming A Guinea Fowl” has received nothing but rave reviews since it debuted on the festival circuit earlier this year. Seven years after her widely acclaimed BAFTA-winning debut “I Am Not a Witch,” she finally returns with a surrealist drama about family secrets.
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The drama centers on a middle-aged man’s sudden death and brings about a reckoning with the past for an extended Zambian family.
The film stars Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, and Henry B.J. Phiri.
Here’s the official 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.
“On Becoming A Guinea Fowl” opens in theaters on March 7, 2025, via A24. Watch the first trailer below.
