Witches Fly There

Witches Fly There is a film about magical healing and worldview in the East African country Zambia. Woven into modern Africa is a mythical dimension which it is hard for us to perceive as anything but superstition. This film leaves the prejudices behind and takes the viewer head first into the magical dimension of modern African society.

We meet “The Black Jesus”, a respected sorcerer, who lives in his own village with his 5 wives and 82 children. On a busy market in the centre of the capital Lusaka, quacks, necromancers and traditional healers are offering their services. The president of their organisation is fighting a complicated battle against both common African diseases, inflictions caused by witchcraft and Western scepticism. In the biggest University in Zambia, a teacher is lecturing and showing films about flying witches, and on a graveyard, a young, reformed witch explains how he used to dig up and eat corpses. Close by, an old woman is possessed and falls into a trance, in which she kills a goat by sucking out its lungs.

Meanwhile, an African anthropologist appeals to us to keep our eyes and hearts open and relieve us of our Western ideas about what is real and what is not. Many different explanations are given as to what magic really is, but none of them are definite. Magic belongs to an aspect of human reality, which cannot be described objectively.