2018 San Francisco International Film Festival—Part 3
Poverty, war and right-wing politics—and the lives of two artists
I Am Not a Witch, The Workshop, The Distant Barking of Dogs, Garry Winograd and Louise Lecavalier
By
Joanne Laurier
27 April 2018
This is the third in a series of articles on the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, held April 4-17. The first part was posted April 18 and the second part on April 20.
I Am Not a Witch
More than 86 percent of Zambia’s 14.6 million people are living on less than a dollar a day, according to a March 2017 United Nations Development Program report. In 2015, Zambian Watchdog ranked Zambia the poorest country in the world, ahead of such impoverished regions and nations as Gaza Strip, Zimbabwe and Suriname.
Burdened by the weight of the population’s extreme deprivation, Zambian cinema faces enormous challenges. Despite this, Zambian-born Welsh director Rungano Nyoni has delivered a strikingly imaginative debut film, I Am Not a Witch. Cast with non-professionals and shot in and around the country’s capital city of Lusaka, the movie features stunning composition with a surrealistic flair to comment on the country’s grinding poverty and the oppression of its population.
As the movie opens, to music by Vivaldi, a busload of tourists arrive at a remote Zambian village to gawk at and snap photos of elderly women seated behind an improvised barrier. The women have painted faces, are dressed in blue and white ragged clothing, and each is tethered to a long white ribbon attached to a giant spool. They have been branded as “witches” and the ribbons are their makeshift chains.
An eight-year-old female orphan (Margaret Mulubwa), who comes to be named Shula, meaning “uprooted one,”…