On Wednesday 25 October, I went to see a screening of the film I Am Not a Witch, as a part of the Global Engagement International Film Nights, hosted at Gateway Film Center.  

This is a film that will shake you for reasons you probably won’t be able to name. At least, that’s what it did to me. Zambian-born and Welsh-raised director Rungano Nyoni paints the experience of a young girl accused of witchcraft through a lens that follows the symbolic ribbon of the absurdity with which witchcraft is snaked through Zambian communities – affecting education, tourism, weather, business, and many other parts of daily life.  

While this film is still powerful without context, in order to truly soak up what Nyoni is doing with her film, it was helpful for me to get some more background on the conversation surrounding modern witchcraft and its societal implications in today’s Zambia. Witch camps are a real part of life in Zambian communities – women and sometimes young girls are often held in them and kept under the power of men in charge. The camps are basically prisons that function as tourist attractions and centers for slave labor. According to Rungano Nyoni’s research for this film – which comes from living in Zambia, and a month spent staying with women in witch camps – it’s often the most vulnerable that end up in these camps.  

“It’s not the belief that I’m against, or that I question,” Nyoni says in an interview with magazine  Mysterious Universe, “because spooky things happen all the time in Zambia. It’s that the witch accusations, are always aimed at older women or children. This is the bit I find absurd.”  

She uses her film to visually represent real life situations in a way that subtly calls out its absurdity. Her film is not angry or preachy; Nyoni confidently and satirically uses her craft to honestly describe a way of life that brings oppression on the vulnerable in Zambian communities.  

The film centers around a young girl given the name Shula by one of the older women in the camp – Shula means “uprooted” and is a good representation of her story. She’s picked up by the police and put into a witch camp after a villager accuses her of witchcraft, because Shula startled her, causing her to drop the water she was carrying. We never get to know Shula in detail – we never meet her family, or even know where she’s from. We meet the government official who parades her around for financial gain, and we’re shown the affection and care with which some of the older women also in the witch-camp take care of her. In my opinion, one of the most visually profound parts of the film is the giant ribbon truck, which holds the spools of ribbon that keep the witches captive, and holds their identity as witches.

*spoiler alert* Shula’s death is just as ambiguous as her life. Did Shula kill herself? Was she murdered? Or did she die just from the sheer exhaustion of what it means to have the identity of being a modern-day witch put on you?  

I believe we don’t need to know what exactly happened to her – because we do know, we know what happens to those living for real in witch camps in Zambia today, and Nyoni is calling us to pay attention.