Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch is a surreal and devastating exploration of how fear, superstition, and authority intertwine to shape lives — especially those of women and children. Blending dark humor with piercing social critique, Nyoni crafts a fable that feels both timeless and unmistakably contemporary, a story that begins as folklore and evolves into political allegory.
| Movie Details | |
|---|---|
| Country | Zambia |
| Year | 2017 |
| Genre | Drama, Satire, Folk Realism |
| Runtime | 93 min |
| Director | Rungano Nyoni |
| Main Actors | Maggie Mulubwa, Henry B.J. Phiri, Nancy Mulilo |
The film follows Shula, a young girl accused of witchcraft in rural Zambia, who is sent to a witch camp where women — bound by white ribbons — are paraded as both warning and spectacle. The setup could easily invite caricature, but Nyoni’s vision resists that. She treats her subject with gravity and wit, exposing the absurd logic of a system that thrives on superstition while depending on it for order.
Maggie Mulubwa’s performance is astonishing in its quiet intensity. Barely speaking, she embodies the collision between innocence and the crushing weight of collective belief. Her gaze becomes the film’s moral anchor — both accusatory and bewildered — as she navigates a world that expects her to confess to something she cannot even comprehend.
Visually, I Am Not a Witch is extraordinary. David Gallego’s cinematography captures Zambia’s landscapes with poetic precision: vast plains, bursts of color, and the oppressive heat that seems to shimmer with meaning. The recurring image of the women’s ribbons — tethering them to their supposed guilt — becomes one of the most striking metaphors in recent cinema: beauty turned into captivity.
Nyoni balances satire and sorrow with precision. Her script exposes the bureaucratic absurdity behind belief systems — the officials who exploit tradition for personal gain, the community’s complicity, the uneasy coexistence between modern institutions and ancestral rituals. Humor surfaces not as relief, but as revelation: laughter that leaves a bitter aftertaste.
What makes the film remarkable is its tonal fluidity. It oscillates between the lyrical and the grotesque, the tender and the cruel, revealing how the mechanisms of control often masquerade as ritual. Shula’s world is one where faith, fear, and governance merge into a single, unchallengeable authority — and in that, Nyoni captures a universal truth about power.
Despite its allegorical framing, the film never loses touch with emotion. It’s grounded in human vulnerability — the need to belong, to be believed, to be free. Every scene pulses with the tension between wonder and terror, as if the film itself were suspended between dream and document.
In the end, I Am Not a Witch doesn’t preach. It observes, questions, and lingers. It asks what happens when a child’s silence is mistaken for confession, when myth becomes law, and when spectators — including us — accept injustice as spectacle.
Nyoni’s debut is a triumph of vision and courage: visually stunning, ethically complex, and profoundly unsettling. It invites reflection rather than resolution, reminding us that cinema, at its best, doesn’t just show the world but exposes the invisible threads that hold it together.
