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Rungano Nyoni Quotes

Zambia

Rungano Nyoni is a Zambian-Welsh director, screenwriter and actress. She is best known for her feature-length films I Am Not a Witch and On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, both of which she wrote and directed.

Zambia
Actresses

Random Rungano Nyoni quote

18 quotes

People engage with the subject better through humour than through telling them, ‘This is bad.

I think, if you cast right, kids are the best to work with because they don’t think about it too much. That’s why the thousand kids.

Rather than getting an actor to act, it’s easier to get a non-professional who’s like the character.

You have naturalistic performances but very little control over how it’s going to end up.'

The film isn’t completely realistic, but I think it captures something of that reality.'

This is what it’s like being a woman: you say things, and you say them again.

I was trying to get people closer to our humour, which is cruel, but therapeutic, in a way.'

I thought, ‘Oh my God, these goats are literally more free than these women.

It’s always hard to know why people aren’t listening. Is it because I’m a woman? Because I’m not white?'

‘I was making decisions based on how is this going to come across as a woman…of colour.

They’re free from being persecuted and harmed…but they’re not free within the camp.

That’s a choice I feel like I, as a woman, make all the time

“I’m more nervous than anything … it’s waiting to see it in front of an audience. That either reassures you or makes you even more nervous, so I think that’s when I’ll know.

‘I had to wonder if me being so insistent was going to sabotage my future.

It’s not the belief that I’m against, or that I question, because spooky things happen all the time in Zambia. It’s that the witch accusations, are always aimed at older women or children. This is the bit I find absurd.”

Very, very similar in terms of being super laidback and what you see is what you get. There is no pretence, there’s no trying to figure out what someone is telling you … Thank God my mum didn’t get to London!”

All of them. Every scene has a synopsis, and I basically had to throw away the dialogue. You have a synopsis, and you have where it needs to go next, and where it comes from. It’s great, because everyone is natural.

I've just finished shooting my first feature film in Zambia. I am now in post-production and gearing to finish it in May this year. Fingers crossed.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Rungano Nyoni (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.