The Fourth Annual Rwanda Film Festival - a week-long cinematic orgy of nearly 80 films, representing more than 30 countries around the globe - kicks off with an opening-night gala at the Kigali Serena. The city’s choicest address, the Serena occupies a sprawling compound on a leafy street of embassies and NGOs. It’s a sign of this country’s tragic past that a hotel could be loaded with such portent: before the Serena opened its doors in 2003, the same grounds were occupied by the Hotel des Diplomates - makeshift headquarters for the genocide government after the assassination [View Full Entry]

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We’ve set off from Kigali on the smooth tarmac south, bearing west at Gitarama toward Lake Kivu and the Congolese border. Just reaching Kibuye - a pretty lakeside town on Kivu’s wooded shores - takes you through some of Rwanda’s most dramatic scenery, the green folds of hills stretching in an endless procession. The road is a bold feat of modern engineering - blasted through solid rock, hugging the hills’ edges, with bridges vaulting across brown sluggish rivers where village women stoop to wash their laundry. On the side of the road, barefoot boys lounge in the tall gr [View Full Entry]

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A few days later I’m on the back of a moto, cutting my way across town. Hillywood is off and running, and this afternoon I’ll be joining the festival as they take their portable movie magic to a small town in the north. The sky is overcast, a great gray parasol stretched over Kigali. The rain arrives in hard, cold drops, coming in at sharp angles. We scoot cautiously toward Gacuriro. On the slick road ahead of us a pick-up stops short; a moto following close behind swerves, skids and slides across the tarmac. The driver and his passenger - each [View Full Entry]

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In Gacuriro, a tidy suburb of condos and subdivisions on the fringes of central Kigali, Pierre Kayitana leans forwards, adjust his cuffs, and taps a message into his mobile phone. This is the busiest month of a busy calendar year for Pierre, upon whose wrinkled brow fall headaches big and small for the Rwanda Cinema Centre. The fourth annual Rwanda Film Festival kicks off this Sunday with Hillywood - a week-long, mobile extravaganza showing films on inflatable screens around the country - and Pierre’s phone busily rings and beeps. A to-do list scrawled across four sheets of A-4 paper is [View Full Entry]

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The crowd forms early outside the municipal building - a long, spacious, brick auditorium with barred windows and puddles on the slate-colored floor. Husky women in bright patterned dresses fan themselves in the shade; three stout nuns - wide and boxy as fullbacks - nod their crisp white habits with small, agitated flourishes, crucifixes bouncing from their bosoms. It’s half-past eight on a Wednesday morning in Butare; today, as with every Wednesday for the past five years, the town is gathering for the gacaca. Earlier, a girl from my hotel told me it was an obligation to sit in o [View Full Entry]

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There was a time when Butare, in the south, was on track to become capital of a post-independence Rwanda. Home to the country’s first university, a busy center of intellectual life, it seemed as good a place as any to plant the roots of a new nation. It was, however, buried deep in the south, just a few miles from the border with Burundi, and in the end, Kigali was chosen because of its more favorable, geographically central location. Decades later, with development booming in Kigali, it’s easy to see how the two cities’ fortunes diverged. Butare is small, sluggish, provi [View Full Entry]

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I’ve hooked up with an American staying at the auberge - a PhD student researching her dissertation on gender and post-genocide justice in Rwanda. Having put in time at the genocide tribunal in Arusha - and planning to spend the next month interviewing survivors around the country - Jenna proves to be good company for a few days around Kigali. She tells me about the Kagame government’s strict control of the genocide narrative, about the journalists and aid workers who have been unceremoniously booted from the country for asking the wrong people the wrong questions. There’s a [View Full Entry]

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If you’ve come to Rwanda for anything other than gorillas, your first days are bewildering, full of contradiction. Western knowledge about this country begins and ends with the genocide, yet it’s been almost fourteen years since that terrible chapter in Rwanda’s past was written. President Kagame - despite certain authoritarian tendencies, or perhaps because of them - has helped this country rebuild in ways that most people would’ve considered unimaginable just five years ago. In the past decade, Rwanda’s boasted one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. Ki [View Full Entry]

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It’s a short, easy crossing at the border - the guards, grinning and bashful, pump my hand and welcome me to Rwanda - and the drive to Kigali is long, cramped, scenic. The road winds along a lush valley carved by tea plantations and lined by eucalyptus trees. Villagers stoop in the afternoon heat, plucking tea leaves from the low branches. Women with colorful headscarves walk single-file down dirt paths, propping bright parasols against their shoulders. We pass through small, scruffy villages and fields being worked by bare-chested men with spades. The country is intensely cultivated; ev [View Full Entry]

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I’ve come to the end here in Kabale - an end-of-the-line town just a few miles from the Rwandan border - and just minutes after arriving on the Post Bus from Mbarara, I’m desperate to get to Kigali. Maybe the low, brooding skies have cast this town in unflattering shades of gray; maybe I’m cranky and have a stomach ache and ought to know better about first impressions. But after a quick walk around town to mix with the locals, holding my nose against the pestilential smell, I can say with confidence that this is the most depressing place I’ve seen [View Full Entry]

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