‘On Becoming A Guinea Fowl’ is a surreal and sometimes opaque dissection of sexual abuse within a Zambian family, which has been funded by the BBC. What makes it distinctive is the way in which it shows how abuse can manifest within families, but can just as easily be concealed within them. There are flashes of magical realism which doesn’t always sit easily with the subject matter and which tends to raise more questions than answers. The first time we meet Shula (Susan Chardy) she is dressed in a space outfit and encounters a dead body by the roadside. It turns out that it belongs to her uncle, and a faintly humorous exchange then follows on the telephone in which Shula rings her father who seems to be at a party and does not hear everything she is saying.

He plans to come over to help deal with the relocation of the body of his brother, but first he has to ask Shula to wire him money so that he can afford the taxi ride. It is incongruous moments like this that drive the film which slowly peel away the various layers to reveal how Shula and her cousin each have repressed abuse memories of the recently deceased, and which, when they attempt to report them, are met with fierce resistance. Blood ties take priority for many of the family members over the allegations being raised, and there is always someone else to blame.

There is a tangential reference to a TV show which Shula watched as a child about the guinea fowl which is here interlinked with the idea that it would have been helpful if, in the past, there may have been certain artefacts or, as here, animals which might have been used to signal the advance of an abuser, with childhood trauma being sublimated by the medium of television, here (re-)configured as a possible vessel of warding off unwanted, predatory forces. There is no attempt here to offer pat, easy answers. Rather, ‘On Becoming A Guinea Fowl’ operates at the level of subtext, and navigating the problematic terrain of uncovering abuse which may have been covered up both by others and by oneself while acknowledging that the truth is very difficult for some people to want to accept, making closure not only impossible but actually something that is to be actively resisted.