Film Festival film #7: Un Dimanche à Kigali

[bcholmes]

Un Dimanche à Kigali (A Sunday in Kigali) is a film about the Rwandan genocide. Before I left work, my co-workers and I were joking: one day, one of us should make "The Happy Rwanda Movie". But Un Dimanche à Kigali is not that film.

Bertrand Valcourt is a Quebecois documentary film making in Rwanda; he's making a documentary about AIDS. And while staying at the Mille Collines hotel (the hotel made famous by the events of Hotel Rwanda), he meets Gentille, a Rwandan waitress. They fall in love as tensions rise in Rwanda. Gentille is Hutu (because her father is Hutu), but her physical features take after her Tutsi mother, and throughout the whole film, she is read as Tutsi.

As violence escalates, and it becomes more and more clear that Rwanda is becoming less safe, Bertrand considers leaving, but he keeps delaying, first hoping to finish the documentary, then hoping to film what's going on so that the world can see. He also worries about Gentille's safety, but she doesn't want to leave Rwanda without him. Ultimately, they're still in Kigali when the genocide starts in full on April 6th, 1994.

Much of the film is shown in flashback. 3 months after the Tutsi RPF quashed the genocide, Bertrand travels back to Kigali. It's clear that Gentille didn't make it out of the country, and he's trying to find out what happened to her. He finds some people that he knew before the genocide. Pretty consistently they tell him: "maybe there are some things we shouldn't know." But he keeps on looking. The fact that he could have left sooner, and taken Gentille with him, does not escape his attention. In some ways, he's a metonym for the western world, which could have acted sooner, but did not.

There isn't a happy ending. In fact, the ending is pretty horrific.

There's a part of the ending that I like. The part that pulls no punches and reminds us that pretty horrible stuff happened and if you want to talk about the genocide, you have to confront that, too. But there's a final part of the ending that I really dislike.

And it bugs me, too, that it follows the worn-out "westerner gets caught up in bad events in a far-away land" story-telling structure. I much preferred Hotel Rwanda's willingness to tell its stories through the eyes of the people who were most affected. I wanted narrative focalization on a Rwandan.

There are good points: it's a Canadian film. It's very powerful at time. The performances are amazing (although I think that Gentille is an underdeveloped character). It was even shot in Kigali and employed many Rwandan actors.

There's another thing I've been thinking about, too. About how many people on my friend's list are poo-poo-ing the trend to make 9/11 movies. And it's a poo-poo-ing that I happily join in with; I have no desire to see World Trade Center or any of the other 9/11 films. Especially the Disney piece. 9/11 is still very present with us, I think.

But I think we need more stories told about Rwanda, because it's not very present with us. Because, as these films explicitly tell us, we didn't choose to think about it when it was actually happening. And we need to learn from that.