The mile-a-minute banter and easy repartee between Rungano Nyoni and Susan Chardy, the Zambian British director and lead actor, respectively, of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” belies the “incandescent furious[ness]” that runs through Nyoni’s surreal follow-up to “I Am Not a Witch.”

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” premiered last May in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, and is now playing in theaters across the U.S. In doing so, it joins a tiny handful of films from Sub-Saharan Africa, especially those directed by diasporic Black women, to secure a release stateside.

Nyoni’s resort to endearing guinea fowl local pop culture references has a forceful absurdist denouement, not dissimilar to how she lured the goat’s bleat in “I Am Not a Witch.” Both films sharply critique the culture-specific contradictions that constitute a fragile matriarchal solidarity among women and girls in Zambia.

In “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” protagonist Shula (played by Chardy) is forced to confront the mausoleum of silence perpetuated by her aunties during a suffocating, seemingly endless funeral that she hosts after she discovers her Uncle Fred’s dead body lying on a deserted and discomfortingly well-lit stretch of highway, as she returns home from a costume party, rocking Missy Elliott’s iconic and futurist “The Rain” headgear.

Shula slows down the car, and then seems to stop entirely, as she is figuratively mummified for the rest of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” with her risible cousin Nsansa (played with electric vulnerability by Elizabeth Chisela) her only ally in face of an ever ballooning brood of mother figures, crawling, genuflecting, wailing — funereal idiosyncrasies are a theme in another recent festival hit set in India — but also pointing angry shushing fingers at their nieces. Uncle Fred’s life was pristine, no one else better know better!

In a freewheeling interview with IndieWire, Nyoni reveals her playful and rebellious side as auteur, as she dissects some the artful indulgences she had to scale back on, whereas Chardy, a free-spirited antonym of Shula, attempts to reconcile her own upbringing in England with her character’s proclivities to internalize. The two tease each other and laugh about production behind-the-scenes, even as they notably differ in their core philosophical outlooks about any “agency” — a concept Nyoni hints feels foreign — wielded by younger Zambian women to outwit the coils and embroils of silence.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

IndieWire: It’s been long journey since Cannes. How were you feeling before the U.S. premiere?

Rungano Nyoni: What I want to enjoy is that it is very rare for a film from the continent to get shown in America, in cinemas. I don’t care even if it is just one or two [screens]. The intention to release in cinemas fills with so much pride. It’s a film from Zambia, in Bemba! It’s mind-boggling!

Susan Chardy: I was lucky to go to the New York Film Festival. People there got the film and asked really great questions. I hope other people in America feel the same way. I’d like to put my full house on the table and say that I’d find it very hard to believe if someone would see the film and walk away with nothing.

At the beginning, we see Shula driving alone at night on a deserted highway, returning from a fancy dress party, when she spots her uncle’s body. She is rocking Missy Elliott’s iconic headgear from “The Rain.” I am curious about that Shula and the world of the fancy dress party, so different from the one she is be dragged into for the rest of the film.

Nyoni: I had actually written a scene set in the fancy dress party. But you always ask yourself, “Why am I showing this?” To show Shula is happy, and then suddenly sad? It’s not that simple. It felt cheap. The other thing, if you shoot the fancy dress party, then people will compare: “Oh, this is a film about modernity vs. tradition.” So I had her start off in the car, and you get an inkling of her life while she is inside the vehicle. But Zambia is contradiction of traditions, of ideas, things that live next to each other. So in the beginning, it does look like she’s coming from a different place, a bombastic one.

Chardy: For the rest of the film, she’s internalizing, she’s looking after everyone else. In that moment [in the beginning], she’s a just girl who has fun with her friends. She’s wearing such a bold outfit, it has to be a certain kind of fun person who would embrace that.

The world-building is so notable. I was struck by the contrast between the emptiness of that opening road, and the dark interiors later, with the gradual encroachment of aunties, and surrealist scenes with the flooded dorm and kitchen. What was your thinking behind this, and how did you collaborate with David Gallego, your DP?

Nyoni: We wanted to find more ways of trapping Shula. [One way was] through the limit set by the darkness. It became more dark than we had originally written, so we were always questioning if we should switch on the lights. In the end, I chose to have them off. David and I don’t like coverage, so we had to be very strict about how we framed. We always talked about cutting off Shula’s head or filming her from behind, to make her feel more trapped. I knew in the first shot she had to be trapped. And I wanted the last shot to be very different. [But in the end, we realized] we just need to see her face more [laughs]. So we had to do reshoots. That was a hard lesson.

There is so much rich cultural subtext throughout, especially in the hierarchy and relationships among all the aunties and cousins. An international audience might enjoy but not understand everything a Zambian viewer would. Can you elaborate on what else is playing out here?

Nyoni: There’s actually two Zambian languages being spoken. Shula’s bougie family speaks Bemba. I’m Bemba too. We are the equivalent of the English people, the oppressors in a way [laughs]. People get frustrated since we take up all the high positions. It is changing, though. The widow’s family is definitely from another tribe. They speak Nyanja. The aunties weaponize this against her and isolate her further. So yes, you wouldn’t know that if you saw that.

[At the same time], I don’t want to be anthropological. There are only some things where I feel contextualizing helps. People have fought me on this. Executive producers and financiers were like, “We need to know what is happening.” But I didn’t know anything about your [thing] but I still accepted it. No one said yellow cars were taxis, so why am I contextualizing anything? It’s about being clever enough to write a bit more context without being patronizing or over-explaining. I do sometimes go the other way too much though.

Susan, what about Shula could you relate to and not relate to? How did you think Shula felt when all these aunties were coming at her, starting with the early hotel room scene?

Chardy: I could relate to the sense of responsibility she had and the weight of what she carried within her family. She’s always the one that’s fixing stuff. She could easily have said, “I come from the UK, from the West. I don’t want to do this.” But then she’s the one in the pantry who decides to cook for the widow. She’s the carer, the big sister. I’m oldest in my family, so I know what that’s like. In the end, with [her cousins] Bupe and Nsansa, we have a sisterhood, which is a catalyst to this movement within ourselves to effect change.

The biggest thing I didn’t relate to was Shula’s internalizing pretty much everything. I am an oversharer. I love people. If they become my friend, they really become my friend. [Yet] it was really interesting to dive into this space of processing things so differently than my own. There was a sense of love for her, care for her. I wanted to protect Shula. Because who is protecting her? I felt that watching the film in Cannes, where both Rungano and I were in tears at the end.

The aunties, my God, were wonderful women to work with! All different, and just so committed to the film and the role. Sometimes we’d be off-camera, and they’d still be at each other. It was comical. But that scene with them in the hotel room, there was this sense of me being lowered. They are physically descending at me. Their voices are descending at me. It needed to be like that because at the end of the day, you would not disrespect your elders in our culture. Even if you mean well by it.

Speaking of Shula being on the floor, one of the most striking moments is toward the middle, when the funeral is well on its way. It’s an overhead shot of Shula standing over the aunties, watching them all sleep on the floor in a formation. Visually, it feels like a slight shift in the power dynamic, but we soon know it wasn’t.

Nyoni: Yes, it wasn’t a shift. It shouldn’t be that the aunts would be on the floor. It’s the first time you feel Shula’s going to do something. I was trying to show why you’re so complicit to the silence in this culture. It’s a reflection of my own indecisiveness. This is what my friends from different cultures find frustrating about me. But my own cousins are all trapped in the same way. My cousin’s a doctor, my sister’s a lawyer. Lawyers, doctors, film directors, all stuck in a room, unable to even exert ourselves [in front of our mothers and aunties], in a way that just doesn’t compute with a lot of people.

The whole film is an expression of my own self. Susan is very different from me. I am a closed book. [She looks at Chardy and laughs, Chardy laughs back.] So you basically played me. For me, it’s a conversation about how not everybody can speak up, and why. So I tease [that she will] and then she doesn’t. I wanted people to be frustrated by her. That’s the first thing they ask women, “Why didn’t you say something?” But that’s what’s different about my film. Shula did speak up when she was young [to her mother, as is later revealed]. The twist is that they all knew. You have to deal with the shame of people knowing that. That’s what keeps you more within yourself, somehow.

Susan, could you talk about how your worked with the wonderful Elizabeth Chisela, who plays your cousin Nsansa?

Chardy: Elizabeth grew up in Zambia. I left when I was quite young. So we had different upbringings, culturally. Stepping off the plane for the shoot, when I hadn’t been for a long time, felt like home. Meeting Elizabeth and everyone on set, we just kind of all got on. Elizabeth and I spent time off set, we’d text and we talked. She’s so funny, genius, the things she’d come up with! She jokes she actually wasn’t drunk in any of those scenes. Because Elizabeth and I had built this bond off set, it was nice to know we had each other’s backs when we got into working with our characters. Some scenes were really emotional, we sounded like kids. But the scene in the car, when Elizabeth is looking for something to cover the body, I could barely keep a straight face. If you had gone on a few seconds longer…

Nyoni: Yes, we had to cut off a few frames!

You start the film with a futuristic-looking Shula, so I was wondering what the future is for Shula. The last shot is memorable, it is absurd and surreal. But in a realist sense, I wanted to ask: Does Shula grow up to become like her aunties?

Nyoni: [Pauses] That’s a very good question. I don’t know. I hope not. The mothers — who are the aunties, we call them mothers — their power comes in how collective they are in their ideas and how they reinforce them amongst each other. [Our generation, the cousins], we are much more individualistic, we freestyle. The mothers grew up in the village together, so it’s like speaking to an eight-headed monster. You get all the versions of mother: the hardcore aunty, my mother was the soft one. But they all experience the same thing. They can’t not have. It is part of womanhood that you experience some kind of sexual harassment, sexual assault. They just deal with it with in a different way.

Would Shula be different? I think between the two of them [Shula and Nsansa], they could be a different voice. The difference between us and our mothers is that our mothers are trying to prepare us for a world we just we just refuse to inherit. They want to follow the status quo and we want to change it. They might have tried to change it and failed. As we see in our modern day society, women are still hackled, they’re still mocked if they come out with allegations. It’s still a very difficult hill to climb and they pay the price for it.

The mothers just want to push through and avoid harm. Would Shula do the same thing, avoiding harm? I like to think each generation is a step towards something more nuanced. Our mothers represent something much more different to what their grandmothers experienced, for example. Is it in a good direction? I don’t know, but it’s different.

Chardy: I’m naturally a very positive person. That last shot of us coming forward, I love that shot, yeah, but it’s not like, “Oh, The Avengers are coming in. It will all be fine now.” It’s not that simple. I get that. But for me, there’s so much coming out of those cries, that it’s impossible to imagine that nothing will be done going forward. [Uncle Fred’s death] started this motion for change. That could have been the gift from God. He’s not here, so what are you going to do with this?

For me, it would be strange for Shula to continue her life, have kids of her own, and do what her mother did to her. I feel there’s a sense of drive and determination in her that would try to not make the same mistake. I don’t wanna call it a mistake, because obviously we can’t judge what the mothers and the aunties have been through. But when it comes our generation, you are already sounding the alarm [in the last shot], you’ve got no choice, but to keep forward with it. The change starts here.

Nyoni: I think there’s a difference. Me and my sisters do talk more. We talk as much as probably our mothers do. But I think we are good at disagreeing more, and can still pick up ourselves afterwards. My mother and their generation is so secretive. My mom’s secretive about my own secrets! I have secrets I never had. I have eczema. She would be like, “Don’t tell anybody.” I’m like, “It’s my eczema.” [Chardy laughs] We have secrets about really odd things.

In my old age, I have just no time for it. But we’ve found ways to rebel, a Zambian way, it’s like passive resistance. We don’t announce that we are rebelling. We just don’t turn up for, or we just don’t turn up emotionally. We fight differently.

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is now in theaters.