«I Am Not a Witch» is the third film I have recently watched about the vicissitudes of a little girl, after the American movie «Beasts of the Southern Wild» (2012) and the Philippine production «Birdshot» (2016). All three are satisfactory products, with marked cultural and anthropological components; as well as fascinating and revealing contributions to the female children's universe in film, which has been dominated by the image of Shirley Temple and her variants for many years. The marginal African-American Hushpuppy, the Filipino peasant Maya and, now, the Zambian little witch Shula are victims without knowing it and each film is a journey that, for their short years, reveals their position in the world.
The three works are those to which we frequently turn our backs; and they are as fascinating or more ravishing than the highest flight of L.A. superheroes. Here what flies as high as can be is the originality and creativity of the filmmakers. Throughout their stories, girls confront situations in their environments dominated by violence, injustice and deprivation. Like Maya, Shula does not go to school and, of the three little girls, she is the only one who has nobody, family or friends: she has arrived alone in a town and the easiest way to get rid of her is to accuse her of being a witch. Shula is sent to a witch camp, but a government official sees her salability potential as a "poor little girl" and decides to capitalize on her "sorceress" image and use it in trials, rites against drought, and marketing eggs on television!
Deprived of all her rights, Shula is stigmatized in a way of which there is little knowledge, especially of the meaning of sorcery and witchcraft in African cultures. Although the camps of women accused of witches, who carry out work in the fields, have been denounced, the media do not disclose that, in this century, African children have become one of the main targets of accusations of witchcraft, with the consequent attacks, beatings and even death.
The film maintains a fair balance between drama and magical realism (no terror, if you expected that), through a development that recounts linearly, but with shocks, surprises, without that forced 'flow', so typical of movies that disguise the process of creation and try to hide that fact that we are watching a construction, not reality. The film has beautiful cinematography by David Gallego (the same cinematographer of «Violencia», «Embrace of the Serpent» and «Summer Birds») and original art direction by Nathan Parker: you have to see how witches are held by cords that come out of reels mounted on the truck that takes them to work in a farm... it does look like a parade float in a Rio de Janeiro carnival. The entire cast is effective and, above all, it was directed by an bright woman from Zambia and raised in Wales, named Rungano Nyoni, who was given her name by her parents because in a Zimbabwean language, "Rungano" means 'storyteller'. The prophecy was fulfilled.
It appears that the Los Angeles Film Academy is not interested in "ethnic girls" (unless they are of Irish, Hebrew,Scandinavian, or little monsters of the Disney factory ...) Proposed as the official film to represent the UK in the Oscar feast, «I Am Not a Witch» was ignored, as happened before to the Philippine «Birdshot» and «Beasts of the Southern Wild». But don't let that drive you away. «I Am Not a Witch» is funny, it is fresh, it is contemporary, it is tragic, and it has 16 international awards in its summary.
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