‘How do you not just set everything on fire?’: A film about a Zambian family’s dark past sets Cannes ablaze

(CNN) — The final, searing shot of Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a convergence of everything that’s come before. The film, about a sudden death and family secrets in Zambia, comes to a thundering conclusion in a shouting match that threatens to drown out all empathy. Trauma, misogyny and Kafkaesque logic combine in a toxic brew that’s difficult to stomach, for us as well as its main character.

For a film that has remained even-tempered in its study of family values ­– and the groupthink family can foster – finally, its pulse quickens. You realize that rage, that had felt disquietingly absent before, was there all along.

Nyoni’s first movie “I Am Not A Witch” broke through at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 and won her a BAFTA. The Zambian British filmmaker returned to the festival with another acerbic work, this time with heavyweight backing in the form of US distributor A24 (“Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “The Zone of Interest”) and producer Element Pictures (“Poor Things”), winning the award for best director in the Un Certain Regard competition on May 24.

Like her debut, a satire on the practice of witch camps, also set in Zambia, the country of Nyoni’s birth, “Guinea Fowl” deals with injustice in tragicomic fashion. This time the writer-director’s target is historic abuse, and what happens when the perpetrator can’t or won’t be held accountable.

The idea came from a scrapped plotline for Nyoni’s previous film, she told CNN, in an interview during the festival. She revived it through intensive research, interviewing survivors in Zambia for her Bemba and English-language screenplay.

“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?”

That most people don’t is the thread Nyoni wanted to pull at. “The difficulty of speaking up and the submissiveness you experience in that silence,” she said, is “an ongoing subject” in her filmmaking.

Her sophomore feature concerns Shula (Susan Chardy), a middle-class Zambian who has recently returned from a life abroad. One night, on the way back from a fancy dress party, she discovers her uncle dead by the roadside. She reports this to her father only to be met with the first of a series of bizarre responses to the news. “Uncle Fred can’t die. Just sprinkle some water on him,” she’s told.

Her father is right, albeit for the wrong reasons: Uncle Fred has been living in Shula’s head ever since he abused her as a child. She’s not the only survivor in the family, we learn, nor was any of this much of a secret. Nevertheless, there’s a funeral to be arranged, public displays of mourning to wail through, and a lot of history to be swept under the carpet.

Spiking her drama with surreal images and poetic flourishes, Nyoni sends audiences through the looking glass, then pulls them back with pitch black humor, asking us to question whether what we’re watching is all that absurd in the first place.

“You don’t even look traumatized,” one affronted aunty tells Shula in the aftermath of Fred’s discovery. Later at a gathering of mourners, another aunty instructs her to “cry a bit.” “Why are you so cold hearted?” she adds, “You’re embarrassing us.”

Nyoni sees her film as corrective to how abuse is often depicted. “It’s not what you see in a lot of movies,” she explains, “(where) you say your secret, and everyone comes around you. From my experience – and from what I saw from other people – sometimes that doesn’t happen. Then how do you live with that?”

“Guinea Fowl” zeroes in on a bitter irony: the same conspiracy of silence that is breaking apart individuals is also holding the family together. Deference and duty remain paramount, and to the mourners who descend on the family home to pay their respects, everyone appears outwardly functional. (That this is happening in a matriarchal society, where men are largely side-lined, makes it even more confounding.)

“I know quite well about keeping secrets,” said the writer-director, cryptically. Of the film’s family dynamics, “I know this subject,” she elaborated, “but this is definitely a fictionalized version of whatever it is I’ve experienced.”

Faced with a family omerta and a dead perpetrator, there’s nowhere for Shula to place her anger. “You can’t question a corpse,” her father says, imploring her to let bygones be bygones. It’s taboo to speak ill of the dead. But as memories continue to hemorrhage through, her reaction to her abuser’s death poses questions of his enablers.

In her feature debut, Chardy rises to the challenge of playing Shula. “I empathize with her a lot,” said the actor. “As a person I have a lot to say, and to find this medium where you’re trying to say something without saying something, it’s a push and pull between feeling powerless and powerful at the same time.”

The writer-director also sees some of herself in her lead. “I have this rage,” Nyoni said. “You can see it, but maybe it’s more subtle, it’s somehow repressed.” Screenwriting is “always a reflection of what I’m going through,” she added, “I try not to get in the way of that.”

Shula is not the only perspective the director was interested in, however. Nyoni increasingly folds in the narrative of Fred’s young widow (played by Norah Mwansa) – a victim herself, further victimized by his death.

“The widow I struggled with, so we found people who’ve been in the same situation,” Nyoni said. “They were very candid, and told me about their stories and were really open.”

“I’ve got worse stories to tell about what happens (than what appears in the film),” she added. “Widows end up being a scapegoat for a lot of people’s frustrations.”

In its final act, “Guinea Fowl” shows how difficult it can be to truly break the cycle of abuse. Yet Nyoni’s complicated portrait of family trauma is not without hope, thanks to Shula and a last gasp moment full of sound and fury, signifying everything.

“For me, it’s the most powerful shot in the film,” said Chardy. “It’s bigger than ‘(Shula) finds strength;’ she owns what happened to her and wants to take everybody else with her.”

Chardy hopes the film’s sense of resolve will resonate. “There are a lot more women in the world who have gone through this, and you really don’t know until you speak to someone,” she added.

“I hope that (audiences) will be able to find some strength from the journey that Shula finds herself on.”

“On Becoming A Guinea Fowl” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is coming soon to theaters in the US and UK.

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