Directed by Rungana Nyoni
Featured at the First Annual Boston Women’s Film Festival
at the Museum of Fine Arts
September 29 and October 3–31, 2018
Zambian-born director
Rungano Nyoni has made an unusual film that combines a real-life tragedy for
some women on the planet—enslavement as purported “witches”—with a fantastical fairy
tale about a nine-year-old orphan who’s declared a witch for staring
catatonically at villagers. The worn-out, field-working women of the witch encampment
welcome their new member and name her Shula (Margaret Mulubwa). Shula quickly
becomes the mascot witch of Tembo (John Tembo), the village’s highest official
under a nasty “royal highness,” who looks and acts like the story’s true witch.
The well-fed Tembo, whose luxurious, gated kingdom is surrounded by everyone
else’s poverty, has a sexy wife, or concubine, who was once a witch-slave but
gained a modicum of freedom through her attachment to the “worldly wise” Tembo.
Thus, we have the perfect set-up and characters for a children’s tale: wicked
queen, greedy henchman, enslaved women doing back-breaking work for the lords,
and a little girl caught in the nightmare and needing a way out.
The fairy tale is full of scenery,
costumes, and imagination. The witches wear harnesses with long billowing
ribbons that attach to giant spools on the truck that delivers them to the
fields. They can roam only as far as their ribbons unwind, and when it’s time
to return to their encampment, exhausted, they’re spooled in.
The spool of thread symbol obviously relates
to women’s sphere, which is the second, serious layer of the movie. Real witch
encampments exist in Ghana, and Nyoni researched them for her movie. Innocent women
accused of witchcraft are housed in primitive camps, in part to protect them from
superstitious villagers who would otherwise harm or kill them. In the movie,
with its satirical Disney-like story, the witches wearing face paint are
trucked to a tourist location, parked behind a fence, and forced to leer and
act crazy for Western tourists with cameras, who marvel at these human specimen
as if they’re exotic animals in a zoo.
As Shula’s brief odyssey with the witches
unfolds, episodes of random accusation and justice take place. Shula, Tembo’s
pet-witch, dresses in ceremonial witch regalia in order to identify the man in
a row of suspects who has stolen someone’s valuables. With a few comic twists on
Tembo’s part, Shula points to the criminal. Justice is thus laughable, based on
superstition and a witch’s special nose. In this fairy tale, and in some real-life
communities, witches are believed, and though they are kept separately and in
cruel conditions because they aren’t “human,” their magical powers are vital to
the community’s safety.
For imagination, cinematography, and a
taste of African folklore, I Am Not a
Witch sustains attention. The incorporation of piercing classical music clashes
with the primitive setting and style of story, although it’s likely intentional
for this very reason. However, another choice of soundtrack might have had
stronger impact. Much praise goes to Nyoni’s creative approach to the theme of
women’s treatment. Shula, captured and condemned, begins her village life with
the choice of becoming a witch or a goat (a goat that will be eaten), and her
story ends with the same bad choices. Nice statement and luckily mostly a fairy
tale. #
On Her Shoulders, directed by Sundance award-winner Alexandria Bombach, plays in the Women’s Festival on September 30. It is a must-see documentary for feeling the emotional devastation of genocide. Twenty-three-year-old Nadia Murad’s story of surviving ISIL’s murder and exile of her Yazidi people of the Sinjar region in northern Iraq in 2014, and the abduction of Yazidi women to sell in slave markets, turns this mostly neglected “foreign news story” into a first-hand, personally experienced tragedy. Nadia, traumatized by terror, torture, rape, and family grief, still finds inner strength to speak publicly and continuously for international action to stop ISIL and to help restore a future for the hundreds of thousands of Yazidis now living in refugee camps.
