Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In Lusaka, in the middle of the night, Rungano Nyoni woke up with a start. “It was really early, about 3am or 4am,” says the Zambian-Welsh filmmaker. She climbed out of bed, made her way downstairs and started writing. “I thought I was having a nervous breakdown, to tell you the truth,” she adds. It was morning when her partner discovered her on the sofa, pen still in hand, in a kind of fugue state. Nyoni realised she had written the outline of a script. That script became On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a surreal and darkly funny drama that won Nyoni a Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, the thirtysomething Shula (Susan Chardy) is travelling home from a costume party dressed in a shiny, inflatable suit, when she discovers her uncle’s dead body lying in the middle of the road. As Shula, her loud-mouthed cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), and their many aunts begin the elaborate preparations for his funeral, uncle Fred’s unsavoury past starts to come to light. “In Zambia, the women in the family are expected to do a lot of things around the organisation of a funeral,” explains Nyoni. “We have to take care of the money, the food, co-ordinate everything, as well as be there when people arrive at the house.” But, she considers, “What if you had to do that for someone you didn’t love?” This question is what prompted her film “about the absurdity of having to mourn someone who was terrible”.Nyoni, 42, is speaking from her home, a smallholding on the outskirts of Lusaka that she jokingly calls “the bush”. She, her partner and their two-year-old daughter relocated there from Lisbon two months ago because she wanted her child to have “a country upbringing”. So far, they have encountered three snakes. Anyone averse to spoilers may want to stop reading at this point as it is impossible to discuss On Becoming a Guinea Fowl without broaching the subject of sexual assault, which becomes a key facet of the film when Shula, Nsansa and their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) learn that each has experienced abuse at the hands of Fred. It’s less of a revelation to their elders. “The whole premise of the film is the silence around it,” Nyoni says.Though she does not speak directly about her personal connection to this subject, Nyoni says that, as part of her research, she interviewed “other women who had experienced sexual abuse” in Zambia, and found that the women’s stories had a shared sense of resignation. Nyoni is not convinced that “once you speak up, it’s all going to work out”. She adds: “I and other people I know had a different experience. You speak up, but it doesn’t do anything.” Nyoni’s Bafta-winning debut feature I Am Not a Witch (2017) also dealt with abuse and powerlessness. The story of a taciturn nine-year-old girl who is condemned to a modern-day “witch camp”, it originally included a character who was a survivor of sexual assault. This was cut after Nyoni’s producer told her it would work better as a separate film. A version of it became On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. “If I had one last film left in me, what story would I want to tell?” she remembers asking herself. “It was this one.”Religion plays its part in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl too. Nyoni explains that her tribe is Bemba, and that in this matriarchal culture “the bloodline runs through the women”, but that the vast majority of Zambians are Christian. “The original Bemba teachings talk about equality between men and women,” she says. “But Christianity, which is very patriarchal, gets in the way of that.” While women in Zambia are able to get an education, join the military and become judges, certain expectations remain. “When you get home, you obey your husband and you look after your kids,” Nyoni says. It was this contradiction — of misogyny flourishing in a supposed matriarchy — that she wanted to explore.Though she was born in Zambia, Nyoni and her younger brother grew up in Wales. Her mother, who had worked as a bank manager in her homeland, spent a year studying social work in Cardiff; when she landed a job, the family joined her there. Nyoni was eight. She describes herself self-deprecatingly as “a hard-working B student” and “a trier, for sure”. In the early 2000s, the teenage Nyoni spent hours poring over Cardiff Central Library’s world cinema section (“it had like four shelves”), her taste shaped by the likes of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. Isabelle Huppert’s portrayal of kinky, masochistic genius in the latter transfixed her. “She watches porn and cuts herself? What!” Nyoni recalls thinking. “She was cold, enigmatic, unlikeable. I found it really strange that I was rooting for her.” It was this that prompted Nyoni to try acting herself.She starred in short films and got the bus to London to work as an extra in Bollywood movies. Following an earlier degree in business studies in Birmingham, she completed an MA in screen acting at the Drama Centre London. “You’re always turning away from the camera!” her directors would complain. She was more interested in what was happening behind it. By the time she finished the course, Nyoni knew she wanted to direct.As a storyteller, she has developed a distinctive voice — mordant and mischievous, with a surrealist streak — and both of her feature films have premiered at Cannes. But Nyoni describes the process of filmmaking as a “hard, hard slog”. Shooting on location in Zambia presented particular challenges, such as keeping to tight production schedules when faced with electricity blackouts that could last 20 hours or more. There was also a pressure from the film’s backers to use a tried and tested British crew who “have nothing to do with African culture”, but she fought for a team of local casting coordinators to find people to audition, a process that could take a long time. “You have to go on the radio, newspaper, Facebook, you go to malls. You’d call it street casting in Britain. They want to hire a British person, and they can’t do that for months on end,” she says. “But they don’t want to hire a Zambian person . . . even if it’s 100 times cheaper.” In the end, a compromise was reached: the film’s coolheaded lead, Susan Chardy, was discovered by the film’s UK-based casting director Isabella Odoffin, while the exuberant Elizabeth Chisela, who plays Nsansa, was put forward by the casting team in Zambia.Nyoni jokes that she is prone to ranting, although “if I’m not ranting about something, it’s maybe not that important to me.” Anger, she says, is her fuel. “But it’s a positive anger, because I don’t sit and wallow in it.” It shouldn’t hold you back, she says, “it should transform into something.”‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ is in UK cinemas from December 6Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
