Critics reviews

Nyoni has made a film that burrows inside, well-crafted and well-acted with a stellar, speedy screenplay. The writer-director never rushes this story, but still wastes no time in the film––each scene contains weight and value.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl sustains a thread of dry humor until the final act, when it provides crucial information about all of the characters that recontextualizes everything we’ve learned about them up to this point. Suddenly, the film blazingly transforms into a quiet tragedy of unimaginable scope...

A masterful exploration of the secrets that eat away at a family like termites devouring wood, Nyoni creates a mosaic of emotions that is at times amusing, claustrophobic, and utterly heartbreaking. A brilliant work on every level, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is one of the year’s best works.

"On Becoming a Guinea Fowl" is a magically transcendent, cunningly funny, and arresting piece of cultural commentary that pits the inequalities of tradition against the warmth community can, still, on occasions, provide.

Her new film is an oblique, intensely self-aware and often seriocomically strange family drama about sexual abuse. Its final moments give us something of the magic realism that the title hints at, but its playfully and startlingly surreal images are perhaps at odds with the fundamental seriousness of what this film is about.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is Nyoni’s respect for subtext. Her film doesn’t aim to be a guide, a balm or an ode to forgiveness. The director rejects the ease of over-explanation and allure of an exclusively reverential tone. She reaches for honesty, and what she uncovers is at once disquieting and deeply absorbing.

Blending molasses-dark comedy with searing poetic realism to capture contemporary Zambian society at a generational impasse between staunch tradition and social progress, this is palpably new, future-minded filmmaking, at once intrepidly daring and rigorously poised.

While sharply critical of how even the most cathartic aspects of Bemba’s matrilineal society have been hijacked by patriarchal Christian values, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” resists the temptation to pit one against the other in order to score easy points. On the contrary, this dreamlike but deeply unnerving film aspires to a much thornier dilemma, and to a dramatic question so difficult to answer that Nyoni can’t even ask it without cheating: How do you find the words to speak up against a tradition of silence?