Ben’Imana

In 2012, Rwanda is still dealing with the wounds of the 1994 genocide: Vénéranda, who works as a mediator at the community-based Gacaca courts, stands before the man who murdered her relatives during the genocide, and she does something her own family can barely comprehend: she forgives him. But how is one to forgive when the truth is still being kept silent? Vénéranda therefore organises discussion circles for women who are to speak about the horror of those days. Yet while the mothers struggle for words, her daughter Tina wants at last to lead a different life: to fall in love without asking about her boyfriend’s origins. But an unexpected pregnancy suddenly makes the contradictions burst open within her own family too.

In her feature debut “Ben’Imana”, director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo tells of a country that seeks reconciliation and yet goes on living with its dead. From this she develops a many-voiced portrait of women in which memory can be neither a duty nor a liberation alone. Her camera lingers on faces, observing the hesitation and the silence between words. The political and the intimate simply cannot be separated here: the demand for forgiveness itself becomes an imposition when the pain has not yet found a name. “Ben’Imana” thus refuses the comfortable juxtaposition of revenge and reconciliation, and finds its moving power precisely in that.