Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.

Today’s feature is from the year 2024, we are headed to the Zambia to attend a funeral in…

Movie: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Year: 2024
Director: Rungano Nyoni
Country: Zambia
The Elevator Pitch: Shula returns from abroad to visit her family in Zambia only to accidentally find her uncle’s dead body in the road which sets off funeral rights and family issues.

How Was the Movie?:  

I love it! I do think there is something about a funeral that really illuminates how society is ordered and this movie is a perfect encapsulation of that. There are so many conflicts at the center of this movie which all blow up around the main character’s uncles death. Division in society between old ways and new ways, the youth and elders, the position of women versus men, or where kids are meant to be in relation to their parents. Our main characters time abroad has even changed her relationship to the people who are her family and the relationship she has to her culture. The movie even needles at the position of the middle class over the lower class and the ways in which all of these positions have stifling limitations and boundaries and how they shift uncomfortably as wider society changes. All of that is combined with a beautiful surrealism, and an almost detached horror in this movie.

While the subject matters differs and customs differ I couldn’t stop thinking about this movie in conversation with another fantastic funeral movie, Shiva Baby. While that is a much less heavy movie there is something in the tension of secrets and things that move under the current of society and social group that drives both movies to their inevitable conclusions.

I love this movie a whole lot and every scene is just jam packed with interesting character acting, visual, spoken and unspoken tensions and text, and the movie really pays off its ending as well though I do wish it had pushed further. This one of those movies I ended up thinking about for a long time after we finished watching it which is always the sign of a particularly good and interesting movie. I would definitely suggest people seek out this movie if they are in the mood to have a lot of feelings.

What was for Dinner?: 

For dinner I made a Zambian style chicken stew, nshima (a kind of thick corn porridge) and repu (stewed collard greens except I used kale because that’s what I can get here). This was an amazing dinner that was really just extremely easy to pull together and even easier to eat because of how tasty it was. The hardest part of this whole meal is making nshima which take a big amount of arm power. I had to use yellow corn meal instead of the more traditional white corn meal but they taste functionally similar and this is still easier than making fufu because the texture doesn’t need to be quite as smooth and I feel like casava is harder to “whip” than corn meal. That said my nshima isn’t perfect but I’d say pretty good for a first try.

The chicken you’re supposed to use in the original recipe should have more fat but adding a small amount of oil when you start cooking will net you a pretty similar outcome and since it just cooks low and slow for an hour this is a very easy meal to make. I’ll probably make it again in the future though maybe served with some much easier to make and source mashed potatoes.

That’s it for 2024, see you in the future year of 2025!