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What it is to be labelled, shunned by society

Robyn Sassen
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FRIGHTENED and marked. Shula, the little girl deemed a witch by her village, is played by Maggie Mulubwa in I Am Not A Witch. Photograph courtesy Ogilvy.

THERE IS AN unequivocal boldness to the premise suggested by Rungano Nyoni’s film I am not a Witch, which was chosen to open this year’s European film festival on the art film circuit. By dint of its title, it ticks a number of boxes which are geared to make you want to see it. You think, immediately of the witch issue in Zambia, where the film is based. You think of Arthur Miller’s Crucible and the contemporary symbolism and horror that a witch hunt connotes. But sadly, you get nothing of that discursive energy in this film.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a beautifully photographed film featuring characters and stills that will take your breath away and make you want to grab at those moments and freeze them. But this tale of a little girl of 9 named Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) is violent and frightening but has no back story. The witches are women tossed out of conventional society and they’re painted in a particular way. They’re also attached to long white ribbons on great wooden reels which lend them a sense of whimsy as it is understood to attach them to the ground and prevent them from flying away.

You never do get to understand why this woebegone child who always looks uncomfortable and frightened, has been deemed a witch, where she comes from or what she thinks of the scenario, and you might feel tempted to close your head to the story and just look at the beautiful pictures, and yet there’s a bit of a profound denouement, which makes you sit bolt upright and consider, what if this little one is just an ordinary child? But alas, that line is allowed to sink, uninterrupted, like a lead balloon.

In this work, which is a series of vignettes rather than a story that flows with ease, you are exposed to an unsophisticated society and you’re not given to understand how much of this tale is dinkum Zambian culture and how much has been quirkily fictionalised. You might have read of the persecution of Zambian witches in the news, but at no point do the story tellers in this film give you to understand whether you’re looking at a beautiful if troubling fantasy or a document with real value.

It seems a strange starting point for this film festival, as this Bemba with English subtitles is obscure and unsophisticated in its filmic values. Other works in the programme include Claire Denis’s Let the Sun Shine In, which features the marvellous Juliette Binoche, an Austrian period drama about a blind Viennese pianist called Mademoiselle Paradis and a foray into the horror of social media, directed by Dutch filmmaker Ben Brand, called Find This Dumb Little B*tch and Throw her into a River, amongst others.

 

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