Eve Tushnet
at First Things:
I Am Not a Witch, the brilliant feature debut of Zambian-Welsh writer and director Rungano Nyoni, is a satire with the haunting, surreal sensibility of a fairy tale. A little girl is accused of witchcraft, and driven on a forced journey through an entire society, from parched agrarian fields to a TV call-in talk show. Her enigmatic silence and possible magic powers expose the folly and wickedness of the adults around her—and expose, also, the inevitable consequences of every faith. Internet pioneer John Gilmore famously said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” In I Am Not a Witch we see how every human society interprets its own beliefs as damage, and routes around them.
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