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USA, 2009, 80 Minute Running Time Additional Countries: France Genre/Subjects: Documentary, Political, Social Issues, Women's Issues Programs: Documentary Films, Films in Competition, Women + FilmLanguage: Kinyarwanda English Subtitles
DIRECTOR: Anne Aghion Producer: Anne AghionEditor: Nadia Ben RachidCinematographer: James Kakwerere, Linette Frewin, Claire Bailly du Bois, Mathieu Hagnery
In 2001, years after the killing fields had been plowed under, the Rwandan government initiated a program of open-air trials to try to foster reconciliation between the Tutsis, over half a million of whom were slaughtered during the ethnic cleansing of 1994, and the majority Hutus. More than 11,000 Gacaca courts were set up to deliver community justice in the course of only a few months, bringing some of the 130,000 confessed committers of genocide home from jail to hearings presided over by citizen judges. Amid a peaceful African landscape, My Neighbor My Killer captures a nation’s profoundly emotional struggle to process its collective memories of that terrible violence. Already on the ground in Rwanda at the time, filmmaker Anne Aghion began chronicling the drama of these trials in the village of Gafumba. But as the painful work of the courts stretched longer and longer, what Aghion thought would be a two-year project stretched into a decade of filmmaking that produced three television documentaries – and this feature film, which marks the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre. She and her crew became intimately involved in the process; seen initially by some as a threat, by others as a shield, they ultimately served to keep the two sides in the same room. In a tense standoff that was clearly a step into the future, the central question finally became: how do we speak the truth about the past? The film is dedicated to historian Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, author of Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, which is considered the most comprehensive account of the genocide; Des Forges died in on Feb. 12, 2009, in an airplane crash in Buffalo, New York. Aghion’s shorter documentaries on Rwanda, screened in recent years for television, won her both an Emmy and a Fellini Medal from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). In cooperation with the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness