'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' Is a Revolutionary Call to Speak Up Against Female Abuse

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This story includes minor spoilers about the ending of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. The Zambian Bemba funeral rites depicted in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl are both full of noise and painfully silent. But it's what's left unsaid between the women carrying out these acts in Zambian-British filmmaker Rungano Nyoni's film that speaks volumes about female abuse.

Nyoni’s sophomore feature, released into theaters by A24 on March 7, depicts a family as they lay to rest a man who has done irreparable harm to his young female relatives—the same women expected to perform the duties of his lamentation. The funeral slips more and more into a nightmare as the scope of his abuse is unfurled, and it becomes clear how many people allowed him to continue causing pain. The story is enraging yet familiar, happening time and time again, in communities all over the world, but Rungano’s film is the most effective in recent memory at showing the devastation that a culture of silence around female abuse can cause.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl picks up when Shula (Susan Chardy), recently returned home to Zambia from living in Europe, comes across the dead body of her uncle in the road. One moment, Shula—coming home from a party, dressed like Missy Elliot in the “The Rain” music video— stands over the corpse; the next, we see her as a child, looking down with a stoic, emotionless expression. This surreal scene is the first time that the trauma of what Uncle Fred did to her reemerges. And though it continues to resurface, it’s never clear what exactly happened to her or the other survivors who are revealed throughout the film.

The drama is all the more compelling to leave Uncle Fred’s abuse off-screen—and it was important to Nyoni to depict it that way. “I did include a more explicit version when I wrote the script, but it always felt false to my experience and my version of what I wanted to express,” Nyoni tells Marie Claire via email. “How do you talk about something without talking about something? It is a bit of a challenge and sometimes can deflate expectations because everyone wants that cathartic moment of saying or expressing the truth, but in this setting, it's not truthful.”

With the abuse left unspoken and unseen, the viewer is left only with Shula's POV to set the narrative tone. Shots are frequently claustrophobic close-ups of her face as she sits silently among the mourners in her mother’s empty living room. Shula refuses to join the performative grief for the horrible man—the biggest stand she can take. Still, the confinement never lets up. Even when she’s the only one awake in the house, ordered to cook first thing in the morning, the camera shows Shula framed by a doorway as she stares into the fires under the boiling pots, an effective symbol of the rage she can’t express.

“It was really interesting for me to play Shula and just inhabit this space of internalizing everything, taking thoughts in but not allowing them really to come out. It's kind of turmoil inside,” Chardy tells Marie Claire over Zoom. The 42-year-old Zambian-British actress, who makes her feature-film debut in Guinea Fowl, understands her character’s place as a young woman who has been raised to respect and defer to her elders. “In some of the scenes, Shula is so focused on, How am I going to get this out of me? What am I dealing with inside, and how does this come out? There's silence around [me], but how am I going to be the one to speak up or to get this out?”

Accountability is a lofty ideal in this story. A few minutes into the film, we meet Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), Shula’s unruly cousin who will be some form of inebriated throughout the runtime. At first, she seems like a form of comic relief, until she ultimately presents her own story of abuse, demonstrating the tragedy beneath her tone. Then there’s Bupe (Esther Singini), another cousin who spends most of her time onscreen in the hospital. Bupe is the closest we get to a sober confession of Fred’s deeds, having recorded a video detailing what he did. Though it cuts off before the audience learns the full scope, Shula sees it all. But Bupe’s mother tells her, “Don’t think about it or talk about it. Just keep quiet.”

Silence is a prison for all three of the cousins. They often only find camaraderie in each other, save for one emotional scene where their aunties come together and direct their communal singing towards the young women. The moment of unity is the closest Shula, Nsansa, and Bupe will get to a reckoning, and it’s a moment where men are decidedly absent. But it isn’t the end of the story.

The final survivor is Fred’s young widow, Chichi (Norah Mwansa), who Shula deduces her uncle married when she was only 11 or 12. Even now, she’s still only in her teens, but the mother of a 7-year-old. Throughout the funeral days, Chichi is treated worse and worse by Shula’s aunts who claim that she drove her husband to death by being a neglectful wife. If Shula and her cousins’ turmoil show the inadvertent harm a family can cause within itself, Chichi shows the blatant, abominable harm the unit can turn towards outsiders. While Shula shows how a culture of silence can affect loved ones, Guinea Fowl’s true mastery is expounding upon that to show how none of the young women are truly protected until they all are.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl brings its title to life in the film’s final moments, when Shula, her cousins, and Chichi’s children—the next generation hurt by their traditional ways—approach the family home where they've been gathering and Shula and Chichi’s families are now fighting over the assets Fred left behind. The cacophonous crowd is the initial focus before the shot focuses on Shula and her cousins’ disapproving glares; they’re looking into the chaotic living room but also into the camera, seemingly at the audience. Shula opens her mouth, and we hear an animalistic cry. It rivals what we learn earlier in the film that the guinea fowl’s cry is meant to warn the species when danger is approaching. Shula has become the title.

Rungano became obsessed with guinea fowls while writing the film. “In African culture, they signify healing and courage and protection of loved ones. In sub-Saharan Africa they also signify resilience,” she says. “They are just badass creatures so had to be part of the final shot somehow.” Rungano also composed the final image to be the opposite of the film’s opening, as Shula goes from being “trapped” in the dark to standing tall in an “open, bright, and sort of fantastical” frame.

I left my first viewing of Guinea Fowl entranced and supremely frustrated. The film left me marveling at the cultural tics of Shula’s aunties that I recognized within my own African-American family, the passive-aggressive admonishment of Shula’s behavior. It’s a specific yet universal story about the harm groups can inflict on each other, both unintentional and intentional, all stemming from not treating abuse with the gravity it deserves.

Chardy also recognizes the universal importance of the film. “It can be about anything that resonates with you personally in your life that you've been silent about, whether it's within your job, how you're treated, the color of your skin. Or someone else's experience that you've seen but have not been vocal about,” she says. “I just think, the more silent you are, things fester, and nothing good comes out of festering. We've got to all learn to get things out…The baseline of it is therapy, but on a bigger scale, it's revolutionary. It's movement. It's togetherness.”

“There's no defeat in the film,” the actress adds. “Obviously, there's no justice necessarily, but I feel like it leaves a sense of hope for future generations. So I'm hoping that it encourages more people in the climate that we're in to speak up.”

After showing how this culture of silence can devastate entire generations, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl holds a mirror up to the audience and asks, “What happens if we scream?”