Fan CastingVIXEN

Mari McCabe, a fashion designer living in American exile, returns to her homeland of Zambesi after her aunt’s mysterious death. There, she inherits the Tantu Totem — a spiritual artifact tied to ancestral trauma and generational memory. But Zambesi is no longer her home: it’s ruled by Red Lion, a foreign-backed warlord who controls through terror, propaganda, and ritual humiliation. As the totem’s visions begin to consume her, Mari must face the ghosts of both her people and her own fractured self. Diaspora and memory: What is lost when you leave home? And what do you become when your culture is marketed back to you? False revolutions: Red Lion reflects the real-world cycle of revolutionaries who become despots, cloaking fascism in liberation. Inherited pain: The totem is not a superpower — it’s trauma encoded in an object, passed generation to generation like a wound that won’t close. Silence: The film uses silence heavily — scenes of ritual, grief, violence, and intimacy play without words. Just breath, tears, and movement.