Witch Hunt
2016 · 23m · United States
Directed by Solomon Onita Jr.
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A folktale set in a West African village: a teenage girl hunts down a hunchback boy and is forced to decide whether or not to follow an old superstition.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like stock folklore until you realize the film is actually interrogating the superstition itself—refusing the expected outcome and making the girl's moral choice the real spine. It's the kind of inversion that sneaks up on you because it dresses itself in tradition.
Onita situates this within a lineage of mythic coming-of-age cinema while maintaining ethnographic specificity; the contemplative pacing and formal restraint allow the folktale structure to do its argumentative work without sentimentality. The tonal control—balancing tenderness against moral gravity—suggests a director fluent in both festival tradition and lived narrative.
The decision to hold on the girl's face in the final moment rather than cut away is what transforms this from a moral fable into something that *lives*—it's a single editorial choice that trusts the performer and makes the superstition's weight visible in real time.
Festivals
- Africa International Film Festival 2016, Winner
- International Children's Film Festival Bangladesh 2019, Official Selection