A sometimes puzzling but overall powerful and unusual film from Zambia: I AmNot a Witch

Zambian filmmaker/screenwriter Rungano Nyoni's debut movie, I Am Not a Witch (2017) is a striking and unusual film, although puzzling in many ways, at least to an American viewer, as it's sometimes hard to know to what extent the film is "realistic," to what extend it's satiric and surreal, and to what social problem and issue it's trying to address. That said, the film has some totally astonishing sequences and of course we all get the major theme of the film, which is the way society, whether in Africa or anywhere, demonizes its social outcasts and suppresses the voices of the eccentric and the oppressed - women in particular. The plot such as it is: The film begins with bus or van ride down a barely maintained dusty dirt road till we get to an end point at a series of open-air pens, something like a zoo. We disembark from the bus, buy a "ticket" (expensive, someone says) and we see a large gathering of women in strange garb and with unusual facial masks or tattoos: these are "witches," we're told (tourists are taking pictures); each is attached to a spool and long ribbon of white fabric; we are told this keeps them from "flying." The women burst into a frightening chant. So we see or sense that these women are exploited outcasts who have become social "curiosities"; on some level they remind us of a George Saunders story (people as live exhibits in theme parks; women attached to clotheslines as lawn decor!). But the story is never surreal or supernatural, as the plot gets in motion - and we follow a young girl (later named Shula) who turns up unaccompanied in a small village, where the inhabitants accuse her of begin a witch. After a sham trial - scary! - that convicts her she is shunted off to a corrupt government official who brings Shula to the witch conclave, where she was initiated - and they he tries to profit from her in various ways: claiming that for a fee she can produce rain (the Zambian landscape is dusty and uninviting throughout); bringing her in full witch garb on a TV-talk show, and so forth. Shula throughout is near mute, but she does in various ways resist her fate and refuses to call herself a witch. The end of the film, which I will not divulge, is ambiguous at best. And at the end, we have to wonder exactly what Nyoni is trying to get across: an indictment of African culture? of government corruption? of male chauvinism? of a terrible system of just and of social welfare? Or is the plight of Shula meant to be more symbolic - an allegory for the oppression of all women, or of all outsiders? Or maybe all of these things. Shula is the ultimate scapegoat.