Sometimes in April Contextualising the Rwandan Genocide

19 April 2011

African Perspectives – the monthly film series organised by AfricAvenir Windhoek in cooperation with Studio 77, the Bank Windhoek Arts Festival, WhatsOnWindhoek, and the Franco-Namibian Cultural Centre, present the African film, ‘Sometimes in April’.

About the Rwandan genocide, ‘Sometimes in April’ differs from other films about the 1994 genocide, such as ‘100 days’, ‘Hotel Rwanda’ and Shooting Dogs’, in that it successfully contextualises this dark chapter in Africa’s recent history.

After earning a wider reputation with his previous film, ‘Lumumba’, director – and former Haitian Minister of Culture, Raoul Peck draws his inspiration from reality in order to transpose it to the different strata of an entirely constructed script.

There are no good victims or bad genocide perpetrators but, through the relationship between two brothers, Augustin and Honoré, whose choices oppose, the complexity of a country that has drifted away emerges.

This remarkable film takes place against the backdrop of the genocide in Rwanda that claimed the lives of one million people and forced 3.5 million men, women and children into exile.

At the centre of the film is the relationship between Augustin Muganza, a captain in the Rwandan army in 1994, and Honore, his brother, a Hutu extremist and prominent broadcaster at RTLM.

Augustin and his comrade Xavier defy their military superiors’ instructions in order to get Augustin’s Tutsi wife and children to safety. But Augustin fails to reach them and is arrested by the genocidaires. Augustin opts to entrust his wife and sons to the care of his brother, who agrees to drive them to safety.

This was the last time Augustin was to see his family as he himself gets caught up in a desperate struggle to survive.

Ten years later, Augustin sets out to meet Honore, who is standing trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, for the inflammatory role that he and other journalists played in this devastating civil war. Augustin hopes to find out what had happened to his wife and sons so that he might find some closure.

“I tried to be as authentic as possible in making my films, even if it is under

the label of fiction,” Peck says.

Lines of dialogue, he points out, are taken directly from witnesses’ testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal. The film was shot on location in Rwanda, in the places where massacres took place. Every incident, however melodramatic or far-fetched, has its corollary in actual events.

Born in Port-au-Prince in Haiti in 1953, Peck followed his diplomat father to a posting in then Belgian Congo and spent several years in Kinshasa. After living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, France and the USA, he moved to Germany, where he graduated from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (DFFB). A trained economics engineer, journalist and photographer, he was a professor at New York University in 1994/95. He was Haiti’s Minister for Culture from 1995-97 and was a member of the International Jury at the 2002 Berlinale. Currently he lives in Paris.

‘Sometimes in April’ will be screened next Saturday, April 30 at Studio 77 at 19h00. Entrance is free.

AllAfrica – All the Time