This film written and directed by Rungano Nyoni puts its finger in the wound while hugging us. It all begins when Shula finds her uncle’s dead body in the middle of the road. The absurd drollery with which the moment is staged is transformed, throughout the film, into a meditation on how far a family will go to deny secrets that, deep down, everyone knows. And as much as this Zambian family wants things to remain unsaid, some things are hard to keep quiet.
At dawn and on their way back from a party, two women find their uncle Fred dead by the side of the road and the mourning rituals begin in an almost dreamlike shared setting. Rungano Nyoni’s second feature portrays a middle-class family in Zambia with a majority female presence. During the gatherings and cultural performances of grief, family secrets emerge among the younger women, in which the older ones have been complicit. In an interview, Nyoni says that ‘you can have agency in some aspects of your life, but in others you become a little girl’. The film reveals this hypocrisy, as well as the difficulty of changing the patterns of violence and repression that have been collectively perpetuated.
Bianca Dias
