Review of "I Am Not A Witch"

by Lucy Johns, mentor

“I am Not a Witch” is unspeakably sad and strange. Sad because the inevitability of abuse of the child increases with every scene. Strange because the film overlays the modern apparatus of tourism and government on a society that runs entirely on superstition, on blaming someone nearby for every failure, every disappointment, every loss. 

The film begins with an incredibly unsettling scene of tourists, both black and white, exiting a bus in the middle of nowhere to ogle two rows of women sitting immobile and silent on the ground, legs out, faces painted with white clay. The tourists chat, take pictures, ask questions of a guide as though looking at animals in a game reserve. A bank of white ribbons flutter behind the women. Their meaning will be revealed later. 

The film switches abruptly to a child observing a woman carrying a pot of water on her head. Seeing the child, the woman falters, the pot slips, the water spills. The woman shouts that the child is a witch. A courtroom scene ensues, presided over by a woman in uniform hearing testimony that the child is a witch. She is carefully neutral but it’s clear she’s concerned for the girl, who observes all but says nothing. When the child refuses to speak to deny that she’s a witch, the officer appears resigned. She confers with a higher official who takes the call in his bathtub where he’s being soaped and scrubbed by a well dressed woman. The girl’s fate is sealed, she is delivered to the witches’ compound. 

An extraordinary image of long poles topped by spools of white ribbon moving through a desolate landscape pulls back to reveal the witches riding on a flat-bed truck to a field where they will labor, obviously unpaid. They are each tethered at their back by a white ribbon that unspools as they move but that ultimately determines how far they can go. The child witch is also tethered in this manner. While she is removed from the field work to serve other purposes by the local leader who consigned her to her status, including being asked to pick the criminal from a line-up and serving as the source for white eggs promoted on TV, the ribbon is never removed. When he orders her to make rain come to the parched land, the logic of dependence on the supernatural for survival of an entire community works to its devastating end. 

“I Am Not a Witch,” written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, native of Zambia in southern Africa, reared in the UK, is a tale of scapegoating and helplessness before both earthly and natural powers. The locale is unfamiliar but the tendencies she deftly portrays are readily recognized, if often deeply sublimated, 

in modern societies. This may be part of the film’s widespread success, in addition to its excellent cinematography and unexpected music (18th century European). 

The emotional and visual impact of “I Am Not a Witch” lingers long after it ends. As its themes resonate, it becomes not so strange after all. Does anyone picking from a lineup in a police station know better than little Shula who the perpetrator really is? Does anyone dealing with petty officialdom not understand the need to placate with a little magic – or lies anyway - if disaster is to be averted? Does anyone who knows the risks of abuse suffered by foster children not see what must become of a child lacking any parental protection at all? Does anyone else who sees this film recall the master manipulator blaming all the evils of the world on a single woman about whom believers chanted “Lock her up, lock her up”?

© Lucy Johns (2020)