MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion discusses the three short films and one feature-length film she has produced and directed on a community-based justice process in Rwanda called gacaca. Her films present an intimate view of how Rwandans are living together after the genocide.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention. This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Anne Aghion who’s a multiple award winning film maker who has just finished the third of a trilogy on the gacaca process in Rwanda. The third film, and an overarching film, My Neighbor My Killer, which delves into life after the genocide in Rwanda. Anne has been the recipient of the UNESCO Fellini Prize and an Emmy Award, Anne, thank you very much for speaking with me today.
ANNE AGHION: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So can you start and tell us, how did you first get interested in doing documentaries on Rwanda?
ANNE AGHION: I found out, I guess almost ten years ago now, I found out about the gacaca, which are these community trials that are taking place all throughout Rwanda that started taking place about four years ago, five years ago. I found out about them through several justice officials from Rwanda, and I remember thinking the very first night I heard about it I remember thinking that it was a very bold thing to do and decided to look into it and try to make a film, and now I’ve made four films.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: The first one, Gacaca: Living Together Again in Rwanda came out in 2003. Personally, I will never forget that one. I think it’s a view onto life after the genocide in Rwanda that’s unparalleled elsewhere. Can you just introduce us to the small village and the people that are first introduced there?
ANNE AGHION: Sure, I mean, I’ve been filming now for, I guess, nine years, a little more than nine years in a little town in a very remote area of Rwanda that’s in Gitarama Province, or at least that’s what it used to be called. I’m not sure it’s called that anymore. I think it has a different name because the whole-- I think it’s called the South Province now.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Because of redistricting and renaming?
ANNE AGHION: Yeah. It’s a tiny-tiny little place that’s on a road that’s not very much traveled by any kinds of vehicles. There are about, I don’t know, maybe a thousand people who live there. It was a region where there was a lot of intermarriage, so a lot of the survivors, and mainly the women survivors, happen to be Hutu. Their Tutsi husbands and children were killed often. It’s a very special kind of place. I mean, it’s not unique in the Rwandan context. There are a lot of places where there was a lot of intermarriage and people actually killed members of their own families very often. I look at the whole reconstruction process through that small community, through that small hillside community, and that’s it.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: The gacaca, and again it’s a process that-- a traditional justice, village justice process that the new Rwandan government, new post-genocide, adapted to try to deal with this backlog of people who’d been imprisoned on genocide charges. And essentially people who have a dossier who’ve been in prison stand up before the village and some trained judges and the village comes together to discuss what they saw, the legitimacy of the charges against the person. Did you see some gacaca’s?
ANNE AGHION: Oh, of course. I mean, so the gacaca, I mean, just to put things back in perspective, the first film when I set out to go to Rwanda I really wanted to make a film on the gacaca. I realized very quickly that the gacaca weren’t going to start right away, so the first film focuses on something that at the time was called the pre-gacaca, which basically was presentation of prisoners to the population.
At the time there were 130,000 prisoners in Rwandan prisons. Most of them were waiting trial. They had just started trying people in the regular courts and they had found that about 20 percent of the people they were trying were being acquitted. So they realized that probably 20 percent of the people in prison were innocent. So they decided to put in place this system whereby they would present prisoners who they thought were innocent to the population and if nobody had any objections, they would release them. So that was what the first film focused on.
The second film then, a couple of years later, focused on the return. There was a massive release of prisoners that were returned to their communities before their trial. And the second film focused on the impact of the return of one prisoner, who I had filmed in the previous film, into the community. And it’s not so much about him as it is about the community, how the community reacts, I mean, how the whole village or hill sort of reacts to his return.
After that I decided that the gacaca, the actual trial still hadn’t started and they actually started in that hillside community in January 2005. And that’s when the gacaca went nationwide. There had already been for the prior year some pilot gacaca in about 10 percent of the country, but when the gacaca actually started in this area I decided that I had had such extraordinary access until then that I had to go and film till the end of the process. I started that four years ago in January, a little over four years ago, and I filmed periodically throughout about three years and then I had a year of editing.
I finished a third film in the trilogy which focuses exclusively on the trials called The Notebooks of Memory. Then I decided to make a feature length that encompasses all three films that sort of follows the whole sweep of the story which is called My Neighbor My Killer. And that, I would say, half of My Neighbor My Killer is trials -- is how the gacaca actually unfolds.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: In the second film, then-- what’s extraordinary about the films is that you don’t feel like you’re-- they’re not pedagogical in the sense that you’re explaining a process by any means. The films feel like a human exploration of this incredibly painful task of trying to figure out how people can live together again. There’s a scene in the second one that to me always sums up the task that Rwanda faces. It’s where the man, who as you said, had been released. He’d been accused of participating in the genocide and he’s sitting with two women whose husbands and children had been killed, and they’re talking hypothetically about, “What would you do if someone who’d been involved in the genocide came back.” Even though they’re sitting there right in front of each other. To me that always indicated that this is a moment that even Rwandans can’t quite face yet. Did that change over time, or is anything about that moment that...
ANNE AGHION: It’s interesting because there’s a point, and I can almost remember it. I mean, the gacaca are a complicated system because people have to-- people don’t necessarily like it that much. Survivors, of course, are not happy with the gacaca because they feel that it’s not serious justice. The Hutu in general, I want to say, are not happy about-- although this is maybe not the right way to say it, but they’re not happy about the gacaca, because the gacaca don’t address the war crimes that were perpetrated by the liberating army that today is in power. So it’s sort of an imperfect kind of system, but there’s something. And it’s also a coercive system in a way. I mean, you’re fined if you don’t go to the gacaca. If you don’t show up you have to pay a fine and all that. It’s not all nice as it were. But I have a sense that after having been to Rwanda all these years that there’s a point and I want to say it was in 2005 or 2006, where things sort of moved into more normalcy for the country at large. You could feel, you could sense there was a feeling of normalcy when you arrived in Kigali. It was no longer this feeling of unfathomable pain every time you spoke to somebody in Kigali. However, in the hillside community where I’ve been working I don’t think it’s changed. Do you see what I mean? There’s still this incredible pain, this incredible difficulty, the sense of survivors being disenfranchised, it’s all there.
However, a sense of appeasement almost in the community. There’s a sense of appeasement, I would say, among the women mainly, and whether that comes from the passage of time or whether that comes from the gacaca, I don’t know, it’s very hard to tell, but up there in the hills, or in that hillside community, it doesn’t feel that it’s gone back to normal.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Are there any moments, particularly in the later, the more recent film that you’ve released, or in the process of filming, that stick with you as simply unforgettable?
ANNE AGHION: Oh, there’s a couple of moments in the gacaca. When my editor and I were editing this last film, the feature length, and we did it at the same time as we edited the third film in the trilogy. There’s like almost 150 hours of trial footage. There’s two scenes that when we were watching them in the editing room sort of completely caught us and grabbed us in a very-very-- in very different ways, in fact. Once scene is Felicite, I don’t know if you remember her. She’s the older of the women in the first two films, and now in the feature length. She speaks in a very dignified manner very sort of poised. She’s at the gacaca and she’s talking, answering a young man who was one of her son’s close friends. She says to him, she says-- and he’s sort of saying, “You know how much I loved your son. He was my friend and I had nothing to do with his death etcetera, etcetera.” And she says to him, “You were his friend, how could you say these things, why didn’t you help him to live another day?”
I’m summarizing it here, but it’s a really long tirade. Then she puts her, you know, she sort of says, “And now I’m done. I’m finished talking.” She puts a cloth over head and there’s this silence over the assembly and nobody speaks. And when we were watching the images for the first time we started crying, Nadia and I, Nadia Ben Rachid my editor. We just cried. And it was amazing because we’ve been working together on this for a long time and this was the first time this had ever happened to us that we cried looking at something in the editing room.
There’s another passage that’s also in the film which grabs you in a completely different way. There’s a man whose name is Mutabazi. He’s sort of the witch doctor in the hillside community, and he talks a lot. He says things. He’s always saying things. And he was coerced into being part of the killings, but not really. It’s unclear whether he actually participated effectively or not. At one point he is talking about one or two men, I can’t remember, and telling them that, you know, and testifying in public and he starts to dance, basically, and he does the dance. He tells of how they came to his house and forced him to follow them and all that, and he dances the dance of the militia and he sings along and he’s mimicking the whole situation.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Those who attacked him?
ANNE AGHION: Well, no, not those who attacked him, those who came to coerce him into coming with them in the attacks. And so he’s dancing and it’s like total theater. It’s like he’s mimicking the whole situation. He’s going around and he says, I mean, I’m not going to use the words because I don’t feel comfortable doing it, but it’s a fascinating moment and it’s very gripping. And then what’s also incredible is that as he’s mimicking this and doing this theater -- everybody laughs in the audience.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: They laugh?
ANNE AGHION: And I call it the audience, which is really it’s not an audience, it’s a trial, I mean, it’s a hearing. So it’s a fascinating moment. Those are the two moments that stick to my mind in the newer footage, but there’s more.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You’re extremely patient, and like you said, you’ve gone back. You know this community very well and they know you, which changes what it’s possible for you to see and for your camera to capture. What, in the end, do you think would you like people to understand from your work on the gacaca?
You get to end with a real easy question.
ANNE AGHION: It’s interesting, but I’m not optimistic.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You don’t have to be.
ANNE AGHION: I’m not optimistic, and I’m not talking about Rwanda only here. I’m talking about the world in general. I mean, I think I heard this figure recently that since the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, since the end of the Cold War there have been more than a 125 violent conflicts, civil wars around the world. And I’m thinking this is not about to end. I don’t know if I can be optimistic.
I feel like this some days and then there are days when I think, oh well, the idea that you could actually sit down in a community like this and sort of spell things out in as much as it is being done in Rwanda, or certainly in that community, and sort of speak up and say the things that happened and eventually make other people speak and come together to a point where everybody agrees that this is what happened. I think maybe there is some hope, but at the same time I have to wonder how much of this is satisfactory to everybody involved and what does this mean for the future. What does it mean for the next generation? Will they be frustrated at how things unfolded in the gacaca, or will they carry on in peaceful coexistence? I don’t know. I don’t know.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: For our listeners, the film, and all of Anne’s work on gacaca can be found, or at least information about it and also about how to view these films, which I would encourage everyone to do at www.gacaca films.com. The films are then, so the three, Gacaca, Living together Again in Rwanda?, In Rwanda We Say... The family that does not speak dies, The Notebooks of Memory, and then the feature length film, My Neighbor My Killer. Anne, thank you very much.
ANNE AGHION: Thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
