Professor Sean Hawkins (Professor of History, University of Toronto) introduces tonight’s film, My Neighbour, My Killer, a compassionate exploration into the open air hearings, which started as a social experiment in collective healing after the Rwandan genocide.
Continue Reading
Director Anne Aghion talks with Carolyn Weaver of Voice of America about her film My Neighbour, My Killer.
My Neighbor, My Killer screens Saturday, February 28th, 9 PM at Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, part of the 7th annual Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Buy your tickets here.
The man who killed your family is now living beside you. How do you restore a sense of a just and civil society when you survive a genocide?
Rwanda faces this struggle. In 1999, five years after more than half a million Tutsis were brutally murdered by Rwandan Hutus, the government introduced Gacaca – a process where open air hearings and citizen judges try members of the community for atrocities they committed.
This social experiment permitted confessed genocide killers to leave prison and return to their homes amongst surviving Tutsis. Survivors are asked to forgive them and resume living next door to those who may have raped or killed members of their own family.
Award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion follows this process and the impact it has on a small hamlet over the period of a decade. The raw anger and emotional wounds that may never heal are visible and difficult to witness. It becomes clear that there is no simple solution to reconciliation. Both the victims and perpetrators understand that the path to coexistence will be long and difficult, and this gripping documentary follows this journey with compassion and conscience.
Program Notes by Alex Rogalski
Director Lee Isaac Chung talks about his film Munyurangabo, which screens Tuesday, March 3rd, 7 PM, at Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, part of the 6th Annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Munyurangabo is the story of two young men—one a Tutsi, the other a Hutu—trying to create futures by putting their pasts behind them. For Munyurangabo, this means seeking justice for his parents, who were killed during the fighting. For his friend Sangwa, resolution might come once he’s able to re-visit the lands he fled so long before.
Chung initially went to Rwanda with his wife, an art therapist, who works with survivors of the genocide. He became a volunteer and taught filmmaking at a Christian relief base, eventually fashioning a story out of the real life experience of Jeff Rutagengwa who plays Munyurangabo .
“Like a bolt out of the blue, Korean American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung achieves an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut. . . . This is, flat-out, the discovery of this year’s Un Certain Regard batch” (Robert Koehler, Variety).
Ngabo is a teenaged boy named after the ancient Rwandan warrior Munyurangabo. He steals a machete in Kigali and sets out for the countryside with his friend.
This is a closely observed drama, led by two young men – real-life market porters in Kigali – who are acting on screen for the first time with breathtaking naturalism. But a darker undercurrent simmers beneath the growing tension between Ngabo and Sangwa. There can be no innocent machete in Rwanda. Ngabo has stolen the weapon to return to his own village and take revenge on those who killed his family.
Crafted with dramatic precision and deep humanity, Munyurangabo rises to a stunning plea for reconciliation delivered by a poet the boys meet along the way (embodied by Rwanda’s poet laureate, Edouard B. Uwayo).
– Cameron Bailey, 2007 Toronto International Film Festival Programme Book
Rated PG.
