Rwandan director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambot has become the country's first filmmaker to win the Camera d’Or for best first feature at the Cannes film festival, with Ben’Imana. The Kigali-based director talks to RFI about exploring how survivors and perpetrators continued living side by side in the year’s following the 1994 genocide and the difficult but necessary path towards reconciliation and healing.
Dusabejambo spent more than a decade making the film, which premiered in the festival's Un Certain Regard section and won the top prize for a debut feature.
Set against the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, during which 800,000 people, most of them from the Tutsi ethnic group, were massacred by Hutu militias, Ben’Imana follows a survivor working toward reconciliation and healing within her community while confronting her own painful memories.
“I wanted to pay tribute to the women of my country,” Dusabejambo said during Saturday’s awards ceremony. “To those mothers who found the strength to remain standing with dignity, to forgive, to move forward – however imperfectly, however painfully.”
She spoke to RFI's Siegfried Forster.
RFI: Your film opens on a forest, rolling hills and then a community gathering where a woman stands up and says “I forgive". In your film, is forgiveness the force that sets everything in motion?
Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambot: The beginning of the film is both a beginning and an ending. It marks the start of a new chapter for the characters. Something happened to all of them – they were all victims in different ways – but each person understands those events differently depending on which side they were on.
When genocide takes place between neighbours, within families, where do you stand afterwards? The film begins in a world of justice where your neighbour may be your witness – or your accuser.
It becomes a question of choice. Is forgiveness a choice? Or, even if you want to forgive, do you then have to prove it? I’m not sure the film gives clear answers to those questions. In a society trying to rebuild itself through justice, should we even speak about forgiveness? Or should we speak about truth? About healing? What can actually repair things?
When everything collapses, what do you turn to? My main character has turned towards forgiveness. She then has to prove that forgiveness through her actions in life; she must live it out. She has spoken the words, but she must live it out.
RFI: The gathering depicted in the film is part of the gacaca courts – Rwanda’s community tribunals established after the genocide against the Tutsi. Was this form of justice imposed from above by the government, or did it emerge from victims themselves?
MCD: Although this is a work of fiction, it is rooted in real events. After the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, there were huge numbers of perpetrators in prison, and the country had just emerged from an immense tragedy. People had to be tried. Everything had to be rebuilt.
The authorities turned to methods that already existed in Rwandan society – where respected elders would settle disputes, and where neighbours and communities would come together to resolve conflicts between families. Except that after the genocide, the conflict between neighbours and families was genocide itself. That was the challenge.
The film is about that period – a moment when one generation said: "this happened, this bloodshed happened." During my research, I felt there needed to be a point where future generations could say there was at least an attempt at justice, however difficult and imperfect it may have been.
People had to come together again. Rwandans had to speak to one another. They needed to be able to speak out.
RFI: The film is set in 2012. It took you more than 10 years to make it. Since then, what has changed in terms of reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi?
MCD: Decisions were taken after the genocide because the country had to rebuild itself and rethink its politics. One of the first measures was to remove ethnic identities from national identity cards.
In Rwanda, we share one language and one culture. Unlike in some other African countries, a person’s name does not indicate their ethnic background. We don't have that. So after the genocide, those labels gradually lost much of their importance.
It was clear: this was a genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi. But my generation does not define itself through ethnicity – we define ourselves as Rwandans. I think that distance made it possible for me to make a film like this.
RFI: In the film, many of the victims – especially women – recount the crimes committed against them. Their stories emerge and are heard. Yet the film is also deeply concerned with silence, taboos and what remains unspoken.
MCD: A great deal went into creating that atmosphere. There are the actresses and their relationship to the story and to their own emotions. They gave everything, even their bodies. During casting, I was looking for people whose faces and bodies could express something even before they spoke.
There is also the Rwandan landscape itself. I noticed how the hills intertwine, and the stories of my characters overlap in the same way. I wanted the film to feel unmistakably Rwandan, because that's how we tell stories.
There is always a sense of community that conveys the emotion of what the hills and this landscape have witnessed.
RFI: In one key scene, Veneranda [played by Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi], who preaches forgiveness, realises that her daughter has become pregnant by a boy from the other ethnic group. At first, she cannot bring herself to accept the situation, but then she begins to wash her daughter’s feet.
MCD: Those are the contradictions of being a mother. You love, but you are who you are. I wanted to show the complexity of the relationship between mother and daughter.
At one point, I realised I was really searching for the heart of a mother. That's where something new begins. That's why she spoke about wanting to forgive in the first place. But forgiveness also had to become something visible and real.
RFI: In the closing credits, you thank the German director Volker Schlöndorff, who has often explored Germany’s own history in his work. Did you ever discuss with him the fact that Rwanda embarked on a direct reconciliation process after the genocide, something Germany never truly achieved after the Holocaust?
MCD: While I was working on the project, Volker Schlöndorff recommended me for a three-month programme at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. It gave me the opportunity to rework the screenplay quietly in Berlin.
But it was during Covid, so we never actually met in person.
This interview was adapted from the original in French by Siegfried Forster and has been lightly edited for clarity.
