Ben’Imana: Memory and Forgiveness After the Rwandan Genocide
The first Rwandan feature to compete at Cannes, Ben’Imana, won both the Camera d’Or for best first feature and the FIPRESCI award for the Un Certain Regard competition. Brazilian critic Ivonete Pinto delves into the film’s depiction of the ways genocide cannot be forgotten.
Forget Nuremberg or any other kind of courtroom you are used to seeing in films. The trial that takes place in Rwanda in 2012 is a people’s tribunal, and the setting is far from some austere court of law. Proceedings unfold outdoors, where all parties are free to speak at any moment, without interference from lawyers or judges. In Ben’Imana, the rituals of the tribunal may even appear mundane, yet they concern one of the most significant events in modern history: the genocide perpetrated by the Hutus against the Tutsis in 1994. Over the course of 100 days, between 500,000 and one million people were killed. The mass murder included rapes marked by extreme brutality and every kind of atrocity imaginable. The United Nations declared it a genocide because it involved extermination on ethnic grounds.
In Ben’Imana, however, the historical facts, despite belonging to a recent past, do not need to be known in detail for audiences to grasp the tragic magnitude of what took place there.
Director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, making her feature-film debut, carefully calibrates the information in order to give the narrative fluidity, without turning it into journalism or didactic exposition. The dramaturgy chooses instead to place on screen characters who, in the present day, still bear the scars of the tragedy in its many forms. There are people mutilated by machetes, children left parentless, and women traumatized by gender-based violence; incurable wounds made even worse by the fact that they must continue living alongside their perpetrators and their families. More often than not, they are neighbors.
The protagonist Veneranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) is a leader—feminist in her own way—who seeks to empower the women of the Kibeho district while simultaneously preaching the necessity of forgiveness. The very title of the feature, Ben’Imana, in Kinyarwanda, is an abbreviated expression meaning “children of God,” carrying with it a symbolic religious notion that all people are equal before God.
Veneranda’s inner conflict is put to the test precisely when she finds herself unable to forgive her teenage daughter, Tina (Kesia Kelly Nishimwe), for becoming pregnant. How she resolves this contradiction occupies part of the narrative.
The screenplay strategy, written by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo and Delphine Agut, underscores that the genocide cannot be forgotten. It also highlights how Rwanda’s new justice system rejects the legacy of Belgian colonialism and constructs its own model—democratic, albeit fallible. Veneranda’s conciliatory discourse, contradictory at times, reveals the need to move forward. Yet nothing is straightforward. One of the most illustrative dialogues of just how complex post-genocide reality can be occurs between the sisters Veneranda and Suzanne (Isabelle Kabano). Suzanne questions her sister: why defend a philosophy of forgiveness if the act of forgiving is deeply personal, something impossible to negotiate or buy?
Hutus and Tutsis are still compelled to live side by side, and in the name of pragmatism, reconciliation appears to be the most honorable path forward. In Ben’Imana, there are no constant reminders of who belongs to one ethnic group or the other. This is also part of the filmmaker’s strategy, allowing her to offer a broader perspective on the story by embracing multiple dimensions of the situation. After all, moderate Hutus were also killed during those 100 days. The reconciliation of the country is presented as a state policy in which the director clearly believes.
What deserves to be highlighted cinematically is the fact that Ben’Imana was conceived by a Rwandan filmmaker. Other films about the genocide have already been made, the most widely known being Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), which earned Don Cheadle an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Ben’Imana, however, is the first Rwandan film to address the subject. And the fact that a woman leads such an undertaking is, in itself, emblematic. The physical and moral suffering endured by women carries an indescribable tragedy. In the film, forgiveness is not synonymous with forgetting—it is memory. A way of moving forward.
Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo had been seeking funding for the project for at least ten years. Her persistence was rewarded when the film won the Best Film prize in the Un Certain Regard section from both the official jury and the FIPRESCI jury, making it the first Rwandan feature film ever to compete at Cannes Film Festival. A young director with a promising career ahead of her, Dusabejambo has crafted a dignified and deeply relevant film. More than an obsession, she carried with her a sense of duty: to speak about the genocide of a people, and about how individuals from all ethnic backgrounds still have much to learn from it.
Ivonete Pinto
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2026