10/10/2023 - The Belgian filmmaker tells us about his new documentary, about the search for truth and justice in Rwanda, 30 years after the genocide

(© Aurore Engelen)

We met up with Belgian filmmaker Bernard Bellefroid, who presented in Competition at the Namur International French-Language Film Festival (FIFF) his new film, One of the Thousand Hills [+see also:
film review
interview: Bernard Bellefroid
film profile], which won the Critics’ Prize as well as the Audience Award for Best Documentary.

Cineuropa: What is the genesis of this new documentary shot in Rwanda, after Rwanda, les collines parlent?
Bernard Bellefroid: After this film shot in 2005, during which I had filmed the Gacaca, the community justice courts in three Rwandan villages, I met people that I would see again regularly. I developed rather strong relationships with some people. I witnessed a kind of evolution in the village, towards reconciliation, forgiveness, and an effort to live together. I thought that there was something to do about this evolution.

These notions of reconciliation can seem very difficult to understand, seen from the outside.
Yes, and it also has to be done at the right moment. During the Gacaca, some NGOs made reconciliation and the guarantee that people would live together a requirement for them to do their work. But the people in Rwanda believed that it wasn’t yet the right time for that. It was still a time for justice. Today, questions of reconciliation are on the table. I understand that the Rwandan authorities have to advocate for reconciliation and resilience, but in reality, these are individual and personal journeys. Some people don’t want to remember, others want to never forget. Some want to forgive. All of these journeys exist, and we must respect the journey of each person.

The film rightly focuses on three children, and on a community.
I thought that I should tackle something very small, and go as far with it as possible. The deaths of Fidéline, Fiacre and Olivier, it is one of the events of the genocide in the village. I wanted their story to echo that of all the other children, and to take a universal dimension. These three children were killed in front of the entire village. Many people know what happened to them, but they don’t want to talk about it. It’s bewildering.

The portrait of these children is also a portrait of the community.
The question was: how to make the invisible, visible? There are no longer any traces of these children, no photos, nothing. The genocide was also a symbolic extermination. Their administrative, intimate existence was erased, as if those children had never existed. The film was about about a kind of symbolic restoration of their memory, by imagining the paths they might have gone down. The film paints the portrait of a community in which we see all the people who bowed their heads down, who were scared. I ask myself, if I’d been one of the inhabitants in the village, where would I have been? This is a genocide taking place far from Kigali, from the Rwandan armed forces, we’re among ordinary people, teachers, farmers, these are the people who became criminals taking part in a genocide.

In the village, lifting the veil on the truth is complicated. A few hills away, the film shows another relationship to the truth.
At one point, the film finds itself facing a wall. I know that no one will say anything more to me. The Truth with a capital T is frightening. I filmed the truth of the balance, the equilibrium where people agreed to live together. The legal truth they ended up with. But this truth does not allow us to know what exactly happened to the children. Justice, the Gacaca, handed out sanctions, but not the truth. Thirty kilometers from there, the opposite thing happened. The truth was shared, but there was no trial. We can see that the wounds have not healed, and that for the survivors, the genocide is still something they live in the present. In the first part of the film, I am fighting to put in the frame both criminals and survivors. In the second, the two are already in the frame, and that frame is horrible, it’s a prison. I have the feeling that there, I begin where I would have like my first story to end. We also wonder how these two people could ever stay in the same frame.

(Translated from French)