On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across her uncle’s dead body. 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.

Blending dark comedy with poetic realism, Nyoni critiques the traditional expectation to bury pain with the dead as a family of women refuses to feign grief. Featuring a striking visual style and haunting sound design, the film culminates in a defiant protest against silence and denial, suggesting that memory and truth will always endure.

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