The New Yorker:

Our art reflects a commitment to the pleasant, a subtlety and delay in how we communicate, and an easygoing acceptance of contradiction.

By Namwali Serpell

Most people who see the Zambian British director Rungano Nyoni’s extraordinary new film, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” will not be Zambian. Like Nyoni’s first feature, “I Am Not a Witch” (2017), it has played in film festivals, competed at award shows, and appeared in cinemas in several European countries, and now the United States. It may eventually show up on the back-of-the-seat screens of airplanes on international flights among those nations. It will find its place in the upper ranks of that oddly redundant category “world cinema.” (Where else would cinema be made?)

We generally like it when art bridges worlds like this, when it has cross-cultural or, better yet, universal appeal. But when I first went to see “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” in a New York movie theatre, I found myself sighing, crying, laughing slightly out of synch with the rest of the audience. It was as if I were watching the film’s shadow, or hearing a frequency that no one else could discern. It made me want to take each person there aside, replay the film scene by scene, and say, “There. Did you catch that? That’s so Zambian!” A lesson not in anthropology but in aesthetics.

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