I Am Not a Witch: The Zambian Witch-Camp Satire

The image arrives early and it never lets go. A line of women stand in the dust, and from each of their backs runs a long white ribbon, and each ribbon runs back to an enormous wooden spool on a truck bed, hundreds of metres of it, glinting in the sun. They are tethered. They have been told that if the ribbon is cut, they will turn into goats. So they keep the ribbon.

I Am Not a Witch (2017) is Rungano Nyoni’s first feature, and it is the most confident debut of its decade in any genre. It runs a little over ninety minutes, premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and won Nyoni the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. Nyoni was born in Zambia and raised in Wales, and she spent time researching an actual witch camp in Ghana before writing it — the camps are real, the tethering is a controlled fiction, and the line between the two is where the entire film lives.

It is very funny. It is also, by the last reel, one of the bleakest things I have sat through, and the transition is so gradual that you cannot identify the frame in which the comedy stopped.

The mechanism of the accusation

A woman falls over carrying water and blames a small girl standing nearby. A man reports that a girl in a dream chopped off his arm. A village assembles a case, and the case is nothing, and the case is enough. The girl (Margaret Mulubwa, a non-professional, giving one of the great child performances) will not speak, and her silence is entered as evidence.

She is handed to Mr Banda (Henry B.J. Phiri), a government official whose brief covers tourism and witchcraft with no apparent sense of the two being separate portfolios. Banda names her Shula, which means “uprooted”, and installs her at the camp with the older women. Then he begins to use her: as a judicial oracle wheeled out to identify thieves, as a television guest, as an attraction for coach parties of tourists who photograph the tethered women and buy souvenirs.

The camp itself is where Nyoni’s research shows. The women are old, tired and entirely practical about their situation. They work — sorting, hauling, labouring on state projects — because a tethered woman is free labour with a legal justification attached. They gossip. They look after each other. They induct Shula with a briskness that would suit any workplace, explaining the rules, the ribbon, the goat. Nyoni films their days without a single note of pity, which is why the arrangement reads as a system rather than a tragedy. Somebody drew this up. Somebody signed off on the spools.

Nyoni’s satire has a specific target and it is precise. The belief system is treated as the ambient weather. The film’s contempt is reserved entirely for the apparatus that has grown up around it — the officials, the ministries, the tour operators, the television producers, the men who do not believe a word of it and have found the arrangement extremely convenient. Everyone in this film needs Shula to be a witch. Believing it is optional.

Why it works: deadpan blocking and the borrowed score

The craft is where the film separates itself from every other issue-driven debut of the period.

First, the camera. David Gallego shot this two years after Embrace of the Serpent, and the eye is recognisably the same: wide, still, symmetrical, patient, and completely uninterested in reaction shots. Nyoni stages absurdity in a locked-off wide and refuses to signal. The tourists photograph the women; the shot holds; nobody in frame does anything a comedy would do. Deadpan requires the camera to be the straight man, and this camera is a magnificent straight man.

Second, the tonal grammar. The film cuts between registers — a bureaucrat’s office, a village tribunal, a camp of exhausted women singing — without ever changing its rhythm. Because the rhythm never breaks, you have no cue for when to stop laughing, which means the moment you realise what you have been laughing at lands on you personally. That is a horror technique. The comedy horror tightrope is the argument about how few films can hold both at once; Nyoni’s answer is that you hold both by refusing to acknowledge either.

Third, the music. Nyoni drops European classical music over Zambian dust and Zambian faces, at scale, without irony markers. The effect is complicated and deliberate: the borrowed grandeur is the sound of an outside gaze arriving on a place and deciding it is picturesque. The tourists in the film are doing to the women exactly what the score is doing to the landscape, and Nyoni has implicated her own soundtrack on purpose.

The real ancestor

Reviewers reached for Buñuel, and it is a decent guess — the flat, courteous absurdity of institutions is very much his. The better cross-reference is Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968). Read Reeves’s bleak Puritan nightmare alongside this one and the shared thesis is unmistakable: the witch hunt is a business, the accusation is a service, and the man doing it is a contractor with a fee schedule. Reeves puts Vincent Price on a horse in Suffolk; Nyoni puts a man with a mobile phone in a Land Cruiser. The job description is identical.

The other ancestor is Season of the Witch, Romero’s odd, unloved film about a woman who takes up witchcraft because it is the only power on offer. Both films understand that “witch” is a job a society assigns to a woman it has no other use for. And you won’t be alone is the modern companion piece — another film about a girl who is told what she is before she is old enough to have an opinion.

The case against

The film’s tonal control occasionally becomes tonal evasion. There are stretches — the television appearance, some of the Banda material — where the satire is so composed that the actual women in the actual camps recede into design. The spools are a brilliant conceit and a slightly literary one, and a colder reading would say Nyoni built an image so strong that the film sometimes serves the image.

The second charge is that Shula’s interiority is deliberately withheld and the withholding does double duty; it is both the film’s point about how a silent child becomes a screen for other people’s needs, and a convenient way to avoid writing her. Mulubwa’s face does an enormous amount of work that the script does not do. I would say the performance closes the gap. Others watch the same film and find a hole at the centre where a person should be, and I understand it.

Nyoni came back seven years later with On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024), which took the directing prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and confirms that none of this was luck.

Where to find it, and what next

It is on physical media from a boutique label and turns up regularly on arthouse streaming platforms; it has had a healthier life on disc than most first features. Watch it in one sitting, because the tonal escalation only works uninterrupted.

Then take Atlantics — the other film of that moment in which an African director hands the genre apparatus to the women the system has used up — and the subtitled horror film and the anglophone blind spot, which is the argument about why almost nobody reading this has seen either.

The verdict: a first film with the tonal command of a fifth one, built around the single most efficient image of coerced belief in modern cinema. The ribbon does in one shot what a hundred earnest films about superstition fail to do in two hours. Nyoni knew exactly how funny it was and exactly how much that would cost you later.

Spoilers below

The ribbon is the film’s whole argument, and Nyoni pays it off in the cruellest way available.

Shula is told what every woman in the camp is told: cut the ribbon and become a goat. It is a threat delivered by the state, enforced by nothing at all. Late in the film she asks one of the older women, Charity, whether she would cut it, and the answers she gets are the most quietly devastating exchange in the picture. Freedom is available at any moment, for the price of believing you will not be punished for taking it, and none of them can afford it.

Banda’s arc is where the satire tightens into something merciless. He tries to make Shula a household member, dressing her up, marching her out on television, having his wife — herself a former witch who has been “reformed” into respectability — coach her. That woman is the film’s most horrifying figure: a survivor who has been absorbed by the system and now administers it, whose entire status depends on other women staying tethered.

Then the rains fail, and the district decides that the child on television can end a drought, and she is driven out into the dust and told to make it rain, and the whole administrative machine bets its credibility on a nine-year-old.

The final movement is elliptical and Nyoni refuses to film the moment itself. Shula is gone. The rain comes. The women at the camp gather in the wet, and the film gives us a shot of a ribbon lying loose, and it gives us goats.

You are handed two readings and the film will not choose. Either she cut it and ran, and the rain is weather, and the goats are goats. Or the state killed a child through negligence and exposure and told itself a story about a goat, and the rain is a coincidence a village will spend a generation misreading as proof. Nyoni’s ending works because those two readings describe exactly the same set of events from inside and outside the belief. The horror is that the machinery produces the same outcome either way. A girl who never asked for any of it is dead or vanished, the drought has broken, and the file is closed.