Zambian Welsh director wins big at Cannes Film Festival
A Zambian-Welsh film director has set Cannes ablaze by winning a coveted Best Director prize for her latest feature, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl – a powerful film about sexual abuse.
The acclaimed film, which won Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni.
Carefully blending absurdist humour and horrific undercurrents, the film begins on an empty road in the middle of the night, as 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.
Nyoni’s full-length feature has been described as a “surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves”.
BAFTA Cymru Winner
Born in Zambia, Nyoni migrated to Wales with her family at nine and grew up in Cardiff. She studied at the University of the Arts of London and now lives in Lisbon.
Acclaimed since her debut in 2009 with 20 Questions and The List, and the winner of a BAFTA Cymru Award, her next project was Mwansa the Great (2011) which was nominated for a BAFTA.
Nyoni then co-wrote the short film The Mass of Men, which won a Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2012. Her film Listen (2014) received the Best Narrative Short Award at the Tribeca Festival.
Her first feature, I am Not a Witch caused a sensation, questioning the difficulty of individuals to free themselves from rules and norms, however absurd they may be.
The film, written at La Résidence du Festival de Cannes, was developed and produced with the support of Ffilm Cymru, BFI and Film4.
The film premiered in Cannes and won Nyoni the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut in 2018 and was also the UK’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Feature.
Injustice
Like her debut, a satire on the practice of witch camps, also set in Zambia, the country of Nyoni’s birth, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl deals with injustice in tragicomic fashion.
This time, Nyoni’s target is historic abuse, and what happens when the perpetrator can’t or won’t be held accountable.
Nyoni told CNN: “What I found quite remarkable was how casual people are about sexual abuse,” she said. “Sometimes everybody knows the perpetrator and sits at the (same) dinner table.
“How do you cope with that? How do you cope with somebody, that everybody knows they do that, and then ask them to pass the salt? It’s bizarre to me. How do you not get up and just set everything on fire?“
Vulture named the film one of the 12 best films from Cannes, calling it “completely singular – a surrealistic, pitch-dark comedy about family secrets and the way people close ranks and cover things up to protect one another but ultimately perpetuate serious harm.”
In its glowing review, critic Bilge Ebiri at Vulture writes: “The whole movie is about the ways that cruelty and injustice become codified.
“Sometimes, the only way to preserve your sanity is to go a little insane yourself.”
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is coming to cinemas in the UK soon.
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