Healing From Atrocity
Rwanda’s tribal genocide, pitting Hutu against Tutsi, lasted but a hundred days, though it killed upward to 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu who sympathized with them. In addition to several memoirs written by those affected by the slaughter, a growing number of movies have also addressed this atrocity. Some of them, like Hotel Rwanda, which we considered in Part 1, had as their intended audience those of us who live in the West, and who remained inactive and largely silent while the atrocity happened. Most have centered more on documenting the event, looking backwards to what happened and why, in the hope of providing perspective on the terrible tragedy.
But a few movies have chosen instead to look forward, to begin with the bruised shape of everyday life as it is experienced now and then to suggest possibilities for moving beyond vengeance, death, and hatred. In Part 2 of this series, we considered one of these films, Kinyarwanda (available through Amazon), which presented a post-Genocide Rwanda that is seeking to move beyond its debilitating tribalism.
There is a second Rwandan movie that also deserves mention. It is the movie Munyurangabo (2009), directed, co-written, filmed, and self-financed by a young Korean-American graduate of Yale, Lee Isaac Chung. Again, though it was a small movie in every way – eleven days shooting, a crew with no experience except what Chung taught them, non-actors in all the leading roles (speaking in Kinyarwandan, which Chung did not speak), and a micro-budget – it also was a surprise winner on the festival circuit, being accepted to the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 in the Un Certain Regard section and later playing in Berlin, Toronto, and the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles where it won the Grand Jury Prize.
A Movie By, For, and About Rwandans
Chung, who grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas, went to Kigali in the summer of 2006 on a Christian mission sponsored by Youth with a Mission (YWAM). His wife, Valerie, was returning to Rwanda again to help those affected by the genocide by offering art therapy, and Chung agreed to come along to teach youth in the slums of Kigali how to make movies.
As he prepared for the assignment with Samuel Anderson, a screenwriting friend, he decided the only way to effectively teach filmmaking was actually to make a film. Munyurangabo is the result, a movie that used his students as crew, friends of students and locals as actors, and a class assignment on poetry inserted as the climatic heart of the movie. To make it all work, in the six months prior to his nine week class, Chung and his writing partner developed a 9-10 page outline of a story about two teenage boys from Kigali who set out on the road with a stolen machete to confront the killer of one of the boy’s father during the genocide. Chung also decided early on about several key parameters to the movie that would shape its storytelling and deepen its impact.
First, he decided the movie would be made by, for, and about Rwandans. Chung commented, “I tried to make Munyurangabo a cinema of listening rather than self-expression.” He wanted the movie to almost have the feel of a documentary, though it would be a fictional narrative. To facilitate this, Chung refused to story board or even to write a complete script, for both would impose his judgments on the project. Instead, he chose to trust crew and actors both to flesh out the narrative skeleton and to add to it, using their own intuition and experiences as guides.
Life Matching Art
Particularly important in rooting this movie in Rwandan soil was the casting of two teenagers from the Kitali slums to play the lead roles. Discovered in a soccer league run by one of the students in the class, they were best friends, though one is a Hutu and the other a Tutsi. In the movie, Jeff Rutagengwa plays Ngabo, short for “Munyurangabo,” the Tutsi whose father has been butchered, and Eric Ndorunkundiye plays Sangwa, his Hutu friend, who agrees to go with Ngabo to find his father’s killer if they will first stop off briefly at his family farm along the way. Neither teenagers had ever acted before, and both had come to Kigali after losing their fathers. The friendship and yet strain in relationship that is portrayed on the screen comes out of their very lives together. Here, life matches art, or is it art matching life?
Compelling, as well, in its Rwandan context, is a scene where Sangwa’s estranged father tries to reconnect with his long-absent son by teaching him the rhythm of hoeing the soil. With Ndorunkundiye being a city orphan unused to working the field and the actor playing his father a poor, rural Rwandan, who in real life prepares his soil to farm by hand, the scene has a natural authenticity. Rooted in contemporary Rwandan life, the event is both believable and poignant.
Secondly, in Rwanda today, as we observed in our discussion of Kinyarwanda, there is a strong, public impetus toward tribal reconciliation such that one encounters almost the automatic response, “Oh yes, there’s no more racism.” As Chung observes, “You’re no longer allowed to say ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’ … It’s a big taboo.” Yet, on the personal level, racism lingers. So Chung decided that this too must be shown in the movie.
Aware that one of the girls working at the Reconciliation Center in Rwanda had had to deal with angry parents because she as a Tutsi would help Hutus, Chung included in the movie the painful banishment of Sangwa from his father’s house for befriending Ngabo. And then of course, the overarching story arch is Ngabo seeking vengeance upon his father’s Hutu butcher, a feeling that is so seared into his young conscience that it even creates a rupture in his relationship with his best friend Sangwa.
Reconciliation is future hope; even as it strives also to become present reality. Here the movie’s final, powerful images leave the viewer with both answers and answers.
Lastly, Chung chooses quite consciously to make an “art” film. Chung’s aesthetic, by his own reflection, has been influenced by both Terrence Malick and the Dardennes brothers from Belgium. Chung rarely “tells”; instead, he lovingly shows, allowing scenes to play out naturally, even leisurely, but not with a sense that they have lingered too long. The images of poor rural life allow for a certain dignity to emerge, even among broken plastic jugs and mud huts. Chung’s art, as reviewer Robin Wood comments, is “intelligent about life.”
A New Rwanda
The movie also uses Rwandan music and poetry to strong effect. Particularly compelling is a poem read to Ngabo at a roadside café as he comes near to his father’s killer’s house. It is read by an actor who is the young poet himself, who tells Ngabo he needs to practice his recitation for a public gathering. In one single long close-up, the camera following the movement of the poet, the movie’s informing vision is given voice. We hear the poet passionately call for a new Rwanda, one where reconciliation is projected to go beyond simply a cessation of violence or the end of poverty to embrace a land of unity, freedom and equality.
The poem, together with Ngabo ending his journey by going into the Hutu murderer’s hut alone, only to find him dying of aids and asking for a drink of water, produce the context for the movie’s surprising ending. With no dialogue, but rather with two powerful images of reconciliation, the film leaves it to the viewer to decide how realistically the scene is meant to be taken.
Chung said he did not want the movie to end with a “message” of reconciliation, but rather with an “image” of reconciliation. Thus the ending is perhaps more an eschatological hope, but also one that the film’s whole journey has prepared the viewer to think at least possible. Certainly the movie does not presume to give complete answers to how reconciliation can happen, but it does offer hope.
In an interview, Chung comments, “We wanted to highlight the desire for reconciliation and offer a scenario for it that could even be regarded as a fantasy. Perhaps faith is a lot like this, requiring the act of imagination…. Part of me understands the impossibility of this reconciliation on earth, but the other part believes and hopes that it will [happen]. In the meantime, the work is important. I think that’s what the creation of art can embody – the act of memorializing, mourning, preparing – the act of waiting, which I think isn’t very far from the act of questioning.”
Here is a movie that will both challenge and inspire, one that takes its viewers to the core of what it is to be a part of the family of humankind. It is available on DVD from Amazon.
