Qualification: On becoming a Guinea Fowl
Directed by Rungano Nyoni
Country: Zambia/United Kingdom
Year: 2024
Note: First Zambian film scheduled at Cannes
The “A Certain Look” section of the Cannes Film Festival continues with its firm commitment to redeem itself from the historical past that France treasures. If last year Baloji, the Congolese director of Belgian origin, presented his anticolonial criticism Omen (2023), a few months ago the Zambian director Rungano Nyoni shocked the audience with her second feature film, about abuse, trauma, buried secrets and the lies we tell ourselves. Your new job On becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024), continues with the strategy that flew over his film I’m not a witch (2017), that is, working with an unexpected mix of comedy and denunciation. If in the debut that catapulted her internationally she focused on the superstitions about witchcraft that still exist around women in her country, this time the story focuses on the funeral rituals of a tremendously patriarchal society.
The protagonist, Shula (Susan Cardy), will be forced to organize her uncle’s funeral – a cultural practice that lasts several days – between evasion, mockery and challenging situations that, on the one hand, will strain the family threads and, on the other, They will threaten the social structure itself. The poetic shots of the director of photography, David Gallego – which he repeats again with the Zambian – are present from the beginning of the film. Signing with Gallego is maximizing beauty. If the director’s intention is to represent the wave of filmmakers from the African diaspora, success is assured.
Qualification: The sleeping black
Directed by Skinner-Myers
Country: USA
Year: 2021
Gender: Fiction
After a summer in which social networks have once again allowed the expansion of a climate of hatred towards migrants and racialized people in different cities of the United Kingdom, we recover this film with the air of an angry monologue that the American Skinner Myers produced ago some years. The intention with The sleeping black It is none other than to underline the importance of listening to others and leaving any privilege aside. The plot is about a young black man of about 35 years old who fights against his own blackness after a white boss orders him to commit fraud. A Trump voter appears, hints of discrimination against Afro-descendants in the West, the false promise that university opens doors for you if you are racialized, or the injustice of not being able to rent an apartment with your girlfriend because your hair is not blonde. A current work against racism and social blindness.
