On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
2024 · Rungano Nyoni
When you want a film to chew on for days — sharp, strange, and quietly furious. For viewers who like their comedy pitch-black and their catharsis earned; challenging, but never a slog.
What it's about
Driving home from a costume party in the middle of the night — dressed, indelibly, as Missy Elliott — Shula finds her uncle's body on an empty road. The days-long funeral that gathers her middle-class Zambian family becomes something else: she and her cousins begin dragging into the light what everyone else has agreed never to say aloud.
The experience
Deadpan and dreamlike, with absurdist comedy and buried grief sharing the same frame without warning — it simmers rather than shouts, and the anger underneath builds until it's unmistakable. Unsettling in the best way.
The craft
Rungano Nyoni works in a register of surreal deadpan all her own, and David Gallego's camera holds compositions just long enough for funeral ritual to curdle into indictment. The title comes from a children's TV lesson threaded through the film — the guinea fowl as the bird that cries out to warn the flock — and the film pays that image off with precision.
Why it matters
The second feature that confirmed Nyoni as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from African cinema this century.
Reception & legacy: how On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was received, argued over, and remembered →
Rungano Nyoni's second feature confirmed the Zambian-Welsh director as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from African cinema this century. Driving home from a costume party in the middle of the night — dressed, indelibly, as Missy Elliott — Shula finds her uncle's body on an empty road, and the extended funeral that follows becomes a slow-burning reckoning with what her middle-class Bemba family has chosen not to say aloud. Like her debut I Am Not a Witch, the film works in a register of deadpan surrealism, where absurdist comedy and buried grief occupy the same frame without warning; David Gallego's camera holds compositions just long enough for ritual to curdle into indictment. The title comes from a children's television lesson threaded through the film: the guinea fowl is the bird that cries out to warn the flock of predators. Nyoni won Best Director in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2024 — the funeral rites she depicts with such anthropological precision are ones she has called both beautiful and suffocating, and the film honors both truths.
Lines of influence
- I Am Not a Witch (2017) — Nyoni's own debut establishes her signature grammar — deadpan surrealist tableaux in which a community's cruelty is staged with anthropological flatness and one absurd symbolic prop (the witches' ribbons), a device the guinea-fowl costume directly inherits.
- Dogtooth (2009) — Flat-affect performances inside symmetrical, locked-off compositions that render family pathology as clinical absurdist ritual rather than melodrama — the deadpan-family blueprint Nyoni applies to the Bemba household.
- Songs from the Second Floor (2000) — Locked-off wide tableaux holding deadpan figures well past comfort — the held-composition-as-absurdist-timing technique that structures Nyoni's static frames.
- The Exterminating Angel (1962) — Bourgeois guests trapped by an unspoken social force supplies the complicit-silence-as-surrealism template — the family cannot name the abuse the way Buñuel's guests cannot leave the room.
- Xala (1975) — African satire of patriarchal authority and communal complicity built from precise, ironic tableaux, modelling the tragicomic dissection of a middle-class family's respectability that Nyoni performs on the Bemba bourgeoisie.
- Moolaadé (2004) — Women's collective resistance to a gendered ritual abuse, blocked across communal courtyard space so the group itself becomes the subject — the choral-female framing Nyoni uses for the aunts and cousins.
- Touki Bouki (1973) — African surrealist juxtaposition and a recurring animal motif (the slaughtered zebu) threaded through the edit as symbolic refrain — the montage logic behind Nyoni's guinea-fowl interpolations.
- Embrace of the Serpent (2015) — Cinematographer David Gallego's method — held, deep-frame compositions with a steady anthropological gaze — is the collaborator craft carried directly into Guinea Fowl's imagery.
- Birds of Passage (2018) — Gallego again photographs ritual, family honour and buried violence in formal, symmetrically composed color frames, refining the precise-tableau approach he brings to Nyoni.
- Atlantics (2019) — A mourning/funeral frame becomes the vehicle for a female-communal reckoning with patriarchal harm, staged in still, dusk-lit compositions — the same grief-into-indictment structure among African women.
- This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019) — Southern African funeral-and-ritual narrative told in held, painterly wide frames where the composition itself carries the grief, a formal sibling to Nyoni's static mourning imagery.
- Saint Omer (2022) — Anthropological precision and long, near-motionless frontal frames turn testimony of gendered trauma into quasi-documentary tableau — the same restrained held-shot ethnography of complicity.
- Timbuktu (2014) — Deadpan-inflected tragicomic tableaux stage a community's silent accommodation of oppressive ritual, pairing absurdist beats with grave subject matter as Nyoni does.
- Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (2021) — African women confronting gendered control over the body through quiet, lateral solidarity rather than confrontation — the same insistence that female kinship is the site of resistance.
- The Lobster (2015) — Deadpan-surrealist social satire built on flat vocal affect and absurd rule-bound worlds, sharing Nyoni's tonal register where horror is delivered without inflection.
- Bacurau (2019) — Deadpan surrealism weaponized around a funeral opening and a threatened community, using absurd genre swerves to expose collective violence — a tonal sibling to Nyoni's tragicomic menace.
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