Rwandans Judging Genocide, Their Way

By LARRY ROHTER
NY Times
June 19, 2009

Photo:
Gacaca Court (Left)
Ann Aghio (Right)

The documentary filmmaker Anne Aghion asks a lot of tough questions in “My Neighbor, My Killer,” the fourth and last in her series of films about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But the most difficult, posed on the posters for her new film, may be this: after the killing has ceased, and order has been restored, “How do you make it right again?”

Ms. Aghion has spent nearly a decade, starting in 1999, searching for answers to that question. She has issued progress reports along the way in the form of three documentaries, each running less than an hour; one won her an Emmy. But she said that “My Neighbor, My Killer” is the film she set out to make when she began.

“People in Rwanda sometimes asked me, ‘Why are you here now and not then?’ ” she said. But they also told her, she continued, “ ‘Our troubles are not over, you have to come back and film more.’ The idea that they can inscribe themselves in the bigger picture is part of the healing process and is important to them.”

“My Neighbor, My Killer” is to be shown on Saturday, Monday and Wednesday at Lincoln Center as part of the 20th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. At Saturday’s screening Ms. Aghion will be honored with the Néstor Almendros Award for “courage in filmmaking,” named for the Oscar-winning Spanish cinematographer who was also a director of a pair of documentaries about the absence of human rights in Cuba.

“In making films about human rights, there is always a tension between the material, which can sometimes be difficult to watch or take in, and the aesthetics of filmmaking,” said John Biaggi, the festival’s director.

“But I think that because of Anne’s seriousness in this endeavor, her skill as a filmmaker, and the time and emotional effort she has made, people have wanted to see these films and find them to be very powerful.”

The Rwandan genocide itself has been addressed in feature films like “Hotel Rwanda,” “Sometimes in April” and “Shake Hands with the Devil,” as well as in several books. In little more than three months in mid-1994, from 800,000 to one million people were killed in the storm of ethnic violence that followed the assassination of the country’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana.

The perpetrators were almost exclusively Hutus, while the primary victims were minority Tutsis.

Ms. Aghion, however, focuses on the aftermath of the killing and the trauma it inflicted on those who survived. The vehicle she found to bring those problems from the abstract to the concrete reality of daily life was the “gacacas,” community tribunals set up by the Rwandan government to judge those accused of committing genocide.

More than 11,000 such tribunals were set up, so rather than track the process in the entire country, Ms. Aghion concentrated on a single district. More specifically, she followed the cases of a small group of widows, mostly Hutus married to Tutsis, and the Hutu men who killed the husbands and children of those women.

“The international community is not very good at keeping our focus on a place like Rwanda when it’s off the front pages,” said Sheldon Himelfarb, a conflict management specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, one of the sponsors of Ms. Aghion’s film. “There’s a certain weariness and emotional fatigue that all of us wrestle with when we watch the news on a regular basis and see war after war, death after death. Films like this break through that problem by telling the human story.”

Indeed, the peasant women whom Ms. Aghion interviewed at length bore witness to their terrible experience in an eloquent and heart-wrenching fashion. “I curl up into myself, neither living nor dead,” one woman who lost her husband and children says matter-of-factly. Another describes the patrols armed with machetes that wiped out her family and neighbors as acting as if they were merely “cutting banana trees.”

But Ms. Aghion, 49, a graduate of Barnard College who works and lives in New York and Paris, also manages to show some sympathy for the perpetrators, particularly one man clearly wrestling with his conscience and who wants to make amends to his victims.

“I became very attached to him,” she said. “He seriously struggled to come to terms with what he had done.”

In the first film of her career, “The Earth Moved Under Him,” a look at the lives of Nicaragua’s urban poor, Ms. Aghion also served as a narrator. But for her Rwanda project, she used no narration at all and offered only a minimum of expository footage.

“I didn’t think there was a need for explanation,” she said. “One thing I try to do is make the viewer connect emotionally with what is going on, and if my voice is there, it prevents that from happening.”

For much the same reason, Ms. Aghion also chose not to incorporate the film of swollen corpses floating in rivers or being unearthed from mass graves that became all too familiar in 1994.
“Those images have been shown enough and would only detract from what I was doing,” she said. “I wanted to work on after, not what had happened before.”

In 2006 Ms. Aghion took a break from the Rwanda project and spent four months in Antarctica. The film that resulted from that trip, released just last month, was “Ice People,” a study of geologists working in one of the bleakest landscapes on earth.

“I wouldn’t have been able to finish Rwanda if I hadn’t been to Antarctica,” she said. “It’s been very, very intense, this work. I needed distance emotionally, to think about something else” before coming back for the last stage.

With “My Neighbor, My Killer,” which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Ms. Aghion has concluded her Rwanda project, she said, or at least the film aspect of it. She has accumulated about 350 hours of footage, which she would like to make available to human-rights and academic researchers and perhaps use as the basis for a book.

“This really is a seminal film,” relevant to the experience of people in other zones of conflict, ranging from Bosnia to Darfur, Mr. Biaggi said. “It allows someone who has never set foot in the country to understand how difficult and psychologically complicated it must be to try to sew this society back together again, and that really is a rare thing.”

Note:
In Anne Aghion's “My Neighbor, My Killer,” a community tribunal (Gacaca Court), established by Rwanda’s government, judges those accused of genocide.

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