Ben'Imana
This Cannes-awarded debut feature follows a Rwandan woman who facilitates dialogue between the families of victims and perpetrators two decades after the genocide.
Ben’Imana is the debut feature film of Rwandan director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, set in Rwanda in 2012. Nearly two decades have passed since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Community-led reconciliation trials are underway across the country, and a new era of truth is beginning. The village is like a graveyard, and the truth unbearable.
At the heart of the film is Vénéranda, a survivor of the genocide who leads dialogue between victims and the families of the perpetrators. She helps others rebuild their lives and turn their gaze toward the future, until the news of her own daughter’s unexpected pregnancy forces her to confront the limits of her own convictions. The mediator of reconciliation becomes a mother who must live out for herself what she has taught to others.
Ben’Imana moves in the crosscurrents of forces pulling forward and back: between pain, forgetting, and remembering, in the tension between reconciliation and the longing for justice. How can peace be found in a time when justice can never be fully achieved? The film offers no easy answers, but instead lives on in the space between these questions. Song runs through it as the universal language of grief, and dance as a gesture of liberation—moments in which that which cannot be spoken takes form.
Heta Heikkala
Screenings
-
Cinema OrionMon 21.9. at 16.30–18.11101 min, 1/3
-
Kino Engel 1Tue 22.9. at 21.00–22.41101 min, 2/3
-
Kino Engel 2Sat 26.9. at 18.20–20.01101 min, 3/3