Rungano Nyoni directs Maggie Mulubwa, Henry B.J. Phiri and Nellie Munamonga in this drama about an 8 year old girl who gets sent to an old lady witch camp in Zambia.

Nyoni’s debut starts strongly, giving us a nicely satirical overview of how a young girl or any woman can be ostracised by their community, tied to a ribbon in the wilderness and condemned to indentured labour as a “witch”. It catches the strange mixture of bureaucracy, hysteria and superstition while making it plainly obvious that this subjugation of lone women is unjust and exploitative. There’s some beautiful imagery and telling glimpses of another world within. How true it all is? Not for me to say. But the narrative is constrained by a very closed off lead performance from the child “actor”. And the eventual tragedy is alluded to, but not depicted, robbing the finale of much power.

6