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On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, the Zambian film about sexual violence that shook Cannes
In competition in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl explores grief, rape, and the tributes paid to monstrous men. With this fiction bordering on documentary (produced by A24 Studios), filmmaker Rungano Nyoni was awarded the Prize for Best Directing… The feature film is now available on Apple TV+.
by Alexis Thibault.
Publié le 8 april 2025. Modifié le 9 April 2025.
On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, the film by Rungano Nyoni presented at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
Perhaps Shula should never have stepped out of her second-hand car. But she had to get out eventually to see the body lying in the middle of the road… Uncle Fred is dead. His eyes are open, and his shirt a little crumpled. And Shula is alone on the road, trapped in a puffy, grotesque costume.
She hesitated before getting out, because stepping out meant awakening terrifying memories. Memories of monstrous men who ravage the bodies and minds of Zambia’s middle-class daughters. To be clear: this new feature by Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni deals with rape. This time, fiction comes close to documentary.
Shown at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl touches on grief, tribute, silence, doubt, remorse, secrecy, warning, family, women’s anguish, and the devastation wrought by the dead… Sometimes the filth only emerges in the shrouds.
A bleak, disillusioned feminism
We must remember the name Rungano Nyoni. Born in Zambia, the filmmaker emigrated to Wales at the age of nine. She began experimenting with short films early on and, in 2015, won an award at the Tribeca Film Festival. With Iranian-Finnish screenwriter Hamy Ramezan, she painted a 13-minute portrait of domestic violence. Kuuntele (Listen), nominated for an Oscar and shown at the Directors’ Fortnight, unfolds almost entirely in an interrogation room.
Nyoni’s feminism already appeared radical, bleak, and disillusioned. Her first feature ultimately paved the way for On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. In 2017, she released I Am Not A Witch, a mischievous satire inspired by Alphonse Daudet’s Mr. Seguin’s Goat. By focusing on a nine-year-old girl accused of witchcraft by her village, Nyoni skewered and denounced the absurd beliefs of a sick society. Even then, her main character was called Shula. “The uprooted one” in Swahili.
Everyone knows… but no one talks about it
Rituals and traditions also play a role in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. A wildlife documentary teaches us that helmeted guinea fowl form noisy communities. They’ve developed an alarm system to escape predators and warn nearby animals of approaching danger. Maybe Shula should never have left her second-hand car. The creatures are many, and never far away. And even after they die, their prey still bear the scars of past assaults.
Presented at 2024 Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard section, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl remains a necessary film—even if it sometimes lacks rhythm and, despite being backed by A24, feels fairly conventional. After an outstanding opening, the film ultimately stays quite academic but manages to depict grief with both horror and poetry.
At the close of the 77th Cannes Film Festival, the jury—chaired by actor and director Xavier Dolan and including Maïmouna Doucouré, Moroccan screenwriter and producer Asmae El Moudir, actress Vicky Krieps, and American film critic Todd McCarthy—awarded the Prize for Best Directing to Rungano Nyoni for On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, tied with Roberto Minervini for The Damned.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, winner of the Best Directing Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Now streaming on Apple TV+.
