CANNES: “Ben’Imana” created history when it became the first film by a Rwandan filmmaker to premiere within the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival, which closed on May 23.
Directed by Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo in her feature debut, the film focuses on the memories and emotional fractures that continue to survive decades after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group.
Set in 2012 during the Gacaca trials — established to confront crimes committed during the genocide — the film follows women haunted by memories that resist the language of forgiveness. Dusabejambo sheds light on the emotional weight carried by survivors as the trials become spaces where trauma is relived. Beneath the discourse of reconciliation, the film shows a society attempting to move forward while remaining unable to confront the depth of what was lost.
What makes “Ben’Imana” striking is the way it refuses an easy release of emotion. Again and again, the survivors are asked to forgive, yet the film questions whether forgiveness can truly exist when memory itself remains fractured and silence continues to shape social relations. In that sense, the genocide becomes an invisible but has a permanent presence within everyday life, something that continues to structure conversations and the inability to speak about the past. Dusabejambo captures this tension with remarkable restraint that avoids melodrama while allowing the emotional weight of testimonies and recollections to emerge gradually.
The film is also centered on women carrying the burden of survival. Many of the women in the film witnessed the deaths of entire families, although Dusabejambo refuses to reduce them to symbols of suffering. Instead, the film continually returns to their resilience and dignity, portraying women who continue living alongside the impossible expectations of reconciliation. There is a quiet strength running throughout the film, reflected both in the performances and in the director’s measured and dreamlike visual approach.
What also gives the film much of its emotional power is the smoothness with which Dusabejambo moves between different characters and perspectives without ever losing the rhythm of the story. Rather than centering the narrative around a single emotional trajectory, the film builds a collective portrait of survival that allows each woman’s experience to echo through the others, creating an emotional accumulation throughout the film.
For a debut feature, the film demonstrates an impressive degree of confidence and emotional maturity, while also signaling the growing visibility of African cinema within major international festivals, this time through Rwanda’s arrival into Cannes’ Official Selection.
