The Rwandan Night

Over the course of barely a hundred days in 1994, Rwandan Hutus slaughtered nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The victims of this Rwandan genocide included the parents and many other family members of documentary maker Gilbert Ndahayo. In 2011, he made a film about the death of his loved ones entitled , in which he confronts his parents’ murderers and wonders whether it is possible to rise above the trauma and forgive the perpetrators. In , the first part of a proposed trilogy about the Rwandan genocide, Ndahayo initiates dialogue between survivors and those attempting to place the genocide in a broader context. Handheld shots of remembrance gatherings featuring chilling eyewitness accounts by survivors alternate with interviews with academic researchers. At the heart of the film is a long and mesmerizing monologue by Fidele Sakindi, who describes how as a four-year-old he survived the first genocide of 1959 and how the repeated flare-ups of ethnic violence have cast a dark shadow throughout his life. His testimony and the scenes of mass burials and grieving survivors gain additional emotional color thanks to the use of original Rwandan memorial music, which always resonates with the same question: how is it possible that people who once broke bread together could go on to murder one another so gruesomely?