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.

Comments

[caspervonb.livejournal.com]

"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 can understand that.

I think, however, that movies (or, indeed, any art) about events like
these should force us to consider the horrors so that we do not allow
them to happen again. I believe that they need to make us understand
that these things to not happen unrelated to us in another world.

Rwanda was the failure of the western world and we need to be confronted
with that. These people died because of racial tension and manipulators,
yes, but they also died because of us and our refusal to help.

When people read about it in books, it is horrific but in a detached
sort of way. The impact is intellectual more than anything else. If
we want to prevent these sort of things from happening again, the impact
needs to be more profound, more visceral.

And, unfortunately, one of the problems is that people need someone
to identify with in order to fully understand the events. Hence the
westerner in a foreign land scenario.

This being said, I'd love to see something about the experience of
the people who lived and still live there. But I think it's unlikely
to happen any time soon.

Besides which, I think it may become too voyeuristic at that point.
It would be fine if it incited people to act, to do something to
protect others from the horrors. But it never does.

Do we care that people in Congo and Rwanda are being enslaved and
killed*now* for Coltan? So we can have cell phones? Nope. No one
gives a damn. We look at the movies and images and say "That's
terrible" and change the channel to some drivel. We still don't
think about these things.

This is the land of apathy and the self-centered.