The first film by a Rwandan filmmaker in Cannes’ official selection looks inside a gacaca court
Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana opens this year’s Film Africa with an intergenerational reckoning with the aftermath of Rwanda’s 1994 Tutsi genocide.
The film puts viewers inside a gacaca, an open-air court rooted in indigenous judicial traditions and adapted to facilitate justice and reconciliation after the genocide.
It won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and is the first film directed by a Rwandan filmmaker to be included in the festival’s official selection.
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The Cannes first is the headline, but the more revealing part is what the selection points to: a longstanding lack of international recognition and circulation for cinema from East Africa and the wider continent. One breakthrough film does not undo that.
The festival first is less interesting than the form. Setting the story inside a gacaca makes the courtroom itself the dramatic machinery, putting the film in the company of Bamako and Joshua Oppenheimer’s interrogations of life alongside, and forgiveness of, those responsible for atrocities.