Director: Rungano Nyoni
A late-night discovery on a deserted road pulls back the curtain on a Zambian family's buried history in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the 2024 drama-comedy from director Rungano Nyoni.
What is On Becoming A Guinea Fowl about?
Driving home alone after a costume party, Shula spots what looks like a heap of clothing on the roadside and finds it is the body of her uncle Fred. As word spreads and relatives converge for the funeral rites, the mood inside the family compound curdles from grief into something far more uneasy. Shula and her younger cousins, raised on satellite television and increasingly detached from the older generation's customs, begin comparing notes about Fred while the aunties busy themselves with mourning rituals and appearances. What surfaces isn't a single scandal but a pattern the family has quietly protected for years, one that the funeral's rigid social choreography was never built to hold. Nyoni frames the unraveling with dry, watchful humor rather than melodrama, letting silences and side-eyes carry as much weight as anything said aloud.
Cast & crew
Susan Chardy leads as Shula, playing the role with a guarded stillness that suits a character absorbing more than she lets on. Elizabeth Chisela and Esther Singini appear as her cousins, while Henry B.J. Phiri and Doris Naulapwa fill out the older family members whose composure the film slowly tests.
Context & significance
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a UK-Ireland-US co-production shot in Zambia, following Nyoni's earlier acclaimed feature with a story that again uses ritual and family gathering to expose what a community would rather leave unspoken. The film carries a 7.0 IMDb rating and runs a lean 95 minutes, structured around the days of funeral preparation rather than a conventional plot arc.
Where & how to watch
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is available on K-Time with both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making it accessible to Farsi-speaking viewers in full. The film's page can be read without an account, and watching it simply requires signing in, on a platform whose interface is built around the Iranian diaspora experience.