Set in a rural community where survivors of mass slaughter live abrasively alongside perpetrators, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo's thorny and wayward Camera d'Or-winner asks if it is possible to forgive the unforgivable.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Ejo Cine, Cannes Film Festival The first words spoken in Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo‘s “Ben’Imana,” are of forgiveness. But the body does not forget and the speaker’s defiant stare and tight, unyielding stance suggest she is trying, not wholly successfully, to discipline herself into feeling the words as well as just saying them. Dusejambo’s fraught yet forthright first film, which recently won the Camera d’Or for the best debut in Cannes, lives in the difficult space where what we say roils against what, in our heart of hearts, we really feel, a ferment here agonizingly intensified by the omnipresence — and omni-absences — of the Rwandan genocide. Reflecting on these piercing paradoxes, Dusabejambo’s narrative (co-written with Delphine Agut) cannot but be shaped by them; there are no simple resolutions for a reality defined by ruptures and ragged edges.
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