Rwanda, land of cinema in the spotlight of the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival
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Among African cinematographies, there is one whose inventiveness we did not suspect: that of Rwanda. After the genocide of the Tutsi, which caused between 800,000 and 1 million deaths in the spring of 1994, the cinema nevertheless constituted a privileged mode of artistic expression to put images on the evils of tragedy and heal the wounds. It is this multiple and little-known production that the 15e edition of Angoulême Francophone Film Festival highlights from August 23 to 28.
The rendezvous of Charentais film lovers offers, in addition to the competition and other sections, a rare panorama established in collaboration with the French Institute in Kigali. After a tribute to Tunisia in 2011, to Burkina Faso in 2014 or even to Algeria in 2021Angoulême offers a rich and protean selection of ten feature films and five shorts, which bears witness to “the tremendous resilience of a country looking to the future”according to Marie-France Brière, co-founder of the festival with producer Dominique Besnehard.
Both went to Kigali in May, responding to the invitation of Gaël Faye, author of the novel Little country (Grasset, 2016) and co-director of a documentary, Rwanda: the silence of wordsbroadcast in April on Arte. “It’s essential to smell a country when we pay homage to it”says M.me Briere. On site, the producer says she was inspired by “the absolute creativity that drives Rwandan society”. The work that best sums up the spirit that presided over the choice of the two co-founders of the festival and which will be shown in Angoulême is undoubtedly Sonia Rolland’s film. Born in the Rwandan capital, the former Miss France who became an actress and director released in 2014 a first documentary with an eloquent title, Rwanda, from chaos to miracle.
“The selection ranges from the exterior view of foreign filmmakers to the interior view of the history of the genocide, but also of the current situation and the future. In short, it bridges the gap between the atrocities of 1994 and tomorrow”summarizes Catherine Ruelle, former journalist at RFI.
“A real freedom of tone and expression”
A great specialist in African cinema, the one who will present each of the films to the Angoumoisin public confides her very particular fascination for East African filmmakers. “They come to the surface without an ancestor in the seventh art, in autodictacts. They therefore have a real freedom of tone and expression, without limit to their imagination.she analyzes, citing as an example Kenya and the film Rafiki (2018). Lesbian version of Romeo and Julietthis hymn to love by director Wanuri Kahiu made a strong impression in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.
In the Land of a Thousand Hills, this audacity and this modernity are expressed in particular in Neptune Frost, by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. Shown at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2021 but not yet released in French theaters, this American-Rwandan co-production is a sci-fi-tinged musical romance that follows the relationship between a gender-neutral cyber-pirate and a coltan miner – a mineral used in the manufacture of electronic equipment. As for the short film Icyashaby Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, he also evokes the acceptance of difference, by focusing his remarks on intersex.
Having become a must in the landscape of film festivals in France, Angoulême keeps its spotlight on Africa. For its 2023 edition, it will devote a tribute to another cinematography of the continent: that of Morocco.
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