General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Am Not a Witch

I Am Not a Witch is a 2017 comedy-drama film, the debut feature of the Welsh-Zambian writer-director Rungano Nyoni, in which a young girl in Zambia is accused of witchcraft and exiled to a witch camp. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight on May 25, 2017, and went on to win the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director	Rungano Nyoni, her first feature film; she also wrote the screenplay³
Premise	Shula, a young girl, is found guilty of witchcraft after a brief trial and exiled to a witch camp, tethered by a ribbon; cutting it would transform her into a goat⁴
Premiere	Cannes Film Festival, Directors' Fortnight, May 25, 2017¹
Lead actor	Maggie Mulubwa, a non-professional nine-year-old in her first screen role³^•⁵
Critical scores	98% Tomatometer from 84 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 80 on Metacritic⁶^•⁷
Box office	$182,462 worldwide, of which $50,868 was domestic⁸
Major award	BAFTA Film Award 2018, Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer (Nyoni and producer Emily Morgan)²

Spoilers

Plot and style

The film follows Shula, a young girl who turns up alone in a rural Zambian village. After a minor incident escalates into a witch trial, she is found guilty, taken into state custody, and exiled to a witch camp in the desert. Like the other residents, she is tied to a long white ribbon attached to a coil in a large tree, and is told that cutting the ribbon and trying to escape will curse her and transform her into a goat.⁴^•⁹ During the day she works the land with the other "witches" or sings for tourists. Her situation changes when Mister Banda, an opportunistic government official, takes her under his wing to "do business together", having her pronounce judgments, make rain, and appear on television.¹⁰

Critics describe the film as a hybrid of magical realist drama, deadpan satire, and feminist allegory. The International Film Festival Rotterdam notes that it shows how witchcraft accusations often mask other forms of abuse of power and misogyny, while containing fairy-tale elements, a soundtrack featuring Vivaldi, and a satirical undertone.¹⁰ Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus calls it "a beguiling blend of sorrow, anger, and humor".⁶ Reviewers repeatedly singled out the image of the witch truck, a huge orange truck carrying women tied to outstretched reels, as one of the film's defining visuals.¹¹

Production

Nyoni was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and moved to Cardiff, Wales, at the age of eight; she describes herself as Welsh-Zambian. She is a self-taught writer-director whose earlier short films, including Mwansa the Great (2011) and Listen (2015), played at hundreds of international festivals and won numerous prizes.³^•¹²

In preparation for the movie, Nyoni devoted several weeks to visiting an actual witch camp in Ghana, a country where these settlements are more firmly rooted than in Zambia. The camp's population consisted mostly of women over 70 who were ostensibly under government protection but also exploited for their labor, and most had been denounced as witches by neighbors or family members. She has said that many such camps really exist in parts of Africa, although her fictionalized version is mostly a surrealist fantasy.³

The film was a UK-France-Germany-Zambia co-production, produced by Emily Morgan for Soda Pictures, Juliette Grandmont for Clandestine Films, and Titus Kreyenberg for Unafilm, with backing from the BFI, Film4, Ffilm Cymru Wales, the CNC's Aide aux Cinémas du Monde, the Berlinale's World Cinema Fund, and HBF+Europe. Principal photography ran for six weeks in Lusaka and the surrounding rural areas, with a cast of non-professional actors from across Zambia. David Gallego, previously the cinematographer on Embrace of the Serpent, shot the film.¹²^•¹³

Nyoni's casting of Maggie Mulubwa had a consequence beyond the film: the child had not attended school before and could not speak English when shooting began, so Nyoni started a fundraising page for her education, and the BFI and Film4 agreed to fund it until she was about 18.³

Release and reception

The film premiered in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in May 2017 and screened in the First Feature Competition at the 61st BFI London Film Festival. Its earliest commercial release was in the United Kingdom on October 20, 2017; it reached the United States in limited release on September 7, 2018, distributed by Film Movement.¹^•⁸^•⁹

Critical response was strongly positive. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 98% Tomatometer from 84 reviews, with an audience score of 73%; Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 80, with 18 of 20 critic reviews positive.⁶^•⁷ Time Out London called it "a startling movie" that is "a magic realist fable set in present-day Zambia... a satire, a tragedy and a comedy".⁷ The Guardian's Mark Kermode gave it four stars, describing it as "comic, tragic, and captivatingly beautiful".¹⁴

Commercially the film was small: it grossed $182,462 worldwide, with $50,868 in the United States, $76,194 in the United Kingdom, and smaller totals in the Netherlands, Australia, and Hungary.⁸

Awards

The film won 17 awards and received 38 nominations overall. The BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer went to Nyoni and producer Emily Morgan in 2018. At the British Independent Film Awards in 2017, Nyoni won Best Director and the Douglas Hickox Award for best debut director, while Mulubwa was nominated for Best Actress. The film also won Best Directorial Debut at the Stockholm Film Festival, Best Feature at the Adelaide Film Festival and the Africa International Film Festival, and was nominated for Best International Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. It was the British entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.²^•¹⁵

Legacy

The film is routinely named among the notable debuts of the 2010s and serves as the usual starting point for viewers discovering Nyoni's work.¹⁶ An academic review in African Studies Review read it as "ultimately a film about power: the power to define who you are and to determine what that identity means, as well as the price that such power can exact".¹⁷ TIME included it in a 2022 list of underrated witch films, noting "humor, social satire and shocking pathos" in the award-winning debut.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2017 and 2018

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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