Winner of the Unesco Fellini Prize (2003)
The first film in this award-winning trilogy ventures into the rural heart of the African nation of Rwanda. Follow the first steps in one of the world's boldest experiments in reconciliation: the Gacaca (Ga-CHA-cha) Tribunals. These are a new form of citizen-based justice aimed at unifying this country of 8 million people after the 1994 genocide which claimed over 800,000 lives in 100 days. While world attention is focused on the unfolding procedures, award-winning documentarian Anne Aghion bypasses the usual interviews with politicians and international aid workers, skips the statistics, and goes directly to the emotional core of the story, talking one-on-one with survivors and accused killers alike. In this powerful, compassionate and insightful film, with almost no narration, and using only original footage, she captures first-hand how ordinary people struggle to find a future after cataclysm.
The film was supported by a grant from The Soros Documentary Fund of the Open Society Institute, along with the help of The Sundance Documentary Fund (a program of the Sundance Institute) and with the logistical support of RCN Justice & Démocratie
Emmy Award-winner (2005)
Since 1999, award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion has traveled to rural Rwanda, to chart the impact of that country's efforts at ethnic reconciliation. In Rwanda we say... The family that does not speak dies, her second film on the subject, continues Aghion's quest to learn how the human spirit survives a trauma as unfathomable as the attempt, in 1994, to wipe out the Tutsi minority, with 800,000 lives claimed in 100 days. In Rwanda we say... is the next chapter in a fascinating and intimate look at how, and whether, people can overcome fear, hatred and deep emotional scars, to forge a common future after genocide.
Aghion's influential 2002 film, Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda? captured the feelings of both survivors and alleged killers in the remote community of Ntongwe, just as the government was announcing the Gacaca (ga-CHA-cha), a new system of citizen-based justice intended to handle over 100,000 genocide suspects languishing in detention. In Rwanda we say...returns two years later as close to 16,000 of these suspects, still untried, are released across the country: having confessed to their crimes, and served the maximum sentence the Gacaca will eventually impose, suspects of appalling crimes are sent home to plow fields and fetch water alongside the people they are accused of victimizing.
In Rwanda we say... focuses on the release of one suspect, and the effect of his return on this tiny hillside hamlet. While the government's message of a "united Rwandan family" infiltrates the language of the community, reactions to this imposed co-existence reel from numb acceptance to repressed rage. Violence seems to lurk just below the surface. What unfolds, however, is an astonishing testament to the liberating power of speech: little by little, people begin to talk in a profound and articulate way - first to the camera, and then to each other -- as these neighbors negotiate the emotional task of accepting life side by side.
This third film in the series focuses on tribunals of local citizen-judges weighing survivor accounts of the massacres against the testimony of perpetrators. (2009)
On a lush green Rwandan hillside, more than a decade after the 1994 genocide to wipe out the Tutsi population, a small rural community gathers on the grass over and over again for the Gacaca (ga-CHA-cha) trials, a unique experiment in justice meant to bring unity back to this nation. In The Notebooks of Memory award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion spends four years following the process, as a tribunal of local citizen-judges weighs survivor accounts of the massacres against the testimony of perpretrators who barter confessions for reduced prison sentences.