Advertisement
Published: October 17th 2008
Edit Blog Post
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 of President Habyarimana. It was in the Diplomates’ scruffy rooms, with their thrift-shop furniture and thin-pile carpeting, that Prime Minister Jean Kambanda gathered his ministers to plan atrocities while RPF forces laid siege to Kigali. They were finally forced out when the rebels overtook the city. Today a night in the Serena will set you back a cool three hundred bucks.
Spirits are high as the guests start to file in. The mood is giddy, self-congratulatory - a lot of hand-pumping and back-slapping and exuberant
bonhomie. A camera crew circles the entrance, corralling guests to say a few words about the festival. The line-up includes a certain startled travel writer, who feels decidedly caught-off-guard when a boom is suddenly thrust his way, camera rolling, and he finds himself bluffing his way through an extemporaneous speech on film and the processes of memory and healing. It’s clear that the testimony of a “journalist from New York” adds a certain dignity to the night’s proceedings. But when the cameraman offers to find me for a reprise later on, it’s with unqualified agitation that I agree, already entertaining Errol Flynn-style escape fantasies of vaulting over tall hedges, camera and boom mic in hot pursuit.
Inside I spend a few minutes idling by the bar, where it seems the first bottles of Primus and Mützig won’t be cracked until after the last credits have rolled. It’s a solemn way to start the festivities, since a bit of lugubrious, pre-film sloshing would undoubtedly get the night off on the right foot. Guests stream into the auditorium, casting forlorn glances toward the empty bar, before taking their seats and staring blankly ahead. I see a few familiar faces from Hillywood - Charles, the organizer of the film festival in Nairobi; Patrick, a young Kenyan director from Springfield, Mo. - scattered throughout a crowd that boasts, without question, the highest concentration of white faces this side of, well, Springfield. The ex-pats are here in full force, the diplomats and volunteers, the color high in these pallid faces born in temperate climes. Nothing so galvanizes the ex-pat community like the sight of Africans pulling themselves up by their boot straps and doing good. We are all of us on the brink of a precipitous emotional cliff, eager for a night that will push us over the edge.
There’s a short “cocktail of films,” to quote the night’s organizers, a sampling both foreign and domestic which meets with mixed reviews. The first short,
68° & Clear, by the American director Dawn Westlake, is a hopeful parable of race relations in Los Angeles, in which (according to the program’s synopsis) “an eleven-year-old African-American mugger saves the life of a 40-something suicidal white woman. Just another day in LA, where it’s always 68 degrees and clear.” Equally clear is the implication that, in a city so polarized by race and class, there are a ton of white people who really feel guilty about the whole thing. That salvation comes in the form of a young black boy is a cinematic decision of sweeping, almost breathtaking banality. (That our heroine is decked out in a long, flowing, virginal-white tunic is a symbolic doozy I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot boom.) Despite our best intentions, Americans still don’t know how to talk about race. You can have a black kid saving whitey from himself or a bunch of negro minstrels shucking and jiving across the stage; intellectually, they more or less amount to the same thing.
Thankfully, there’s always Europe, where no one can ever be accused of intellectual reductionism. It’s a point so eloquently taken up by the dark, moody
Dans Le Coeur Existe, a Belgian production set “in a country at war,” in which - I shit you not - “a young woman drags in a bag the remains of the body of her husband, which was brutally cut into pieces by his enemies.” It is a brooding, philosophical piece, one which begs the most immediate question: Belgium, is everything okay? The narrative is so weighted with existential turds like “Here I am, pregnant by your hatred” and “Our bodies are already tombs” that you wonder if the international community couldn’t just stage a humanitarian mission to airlift rainbows and puppy dogs into the tormented heart of the EU. By the time we’re solemnly told that “the world is dead because it isn’t born yet,” you’re sort of hoping for an eleven-year-old African-American mugger to swoop in and save the day.
In their own ways, the two films seem to speak volumes about the metaphysical divide between America (earnest, race-smitten, hopeful) and Europe (existential, angst-ridden, a little bit creepy). Yet both find common cause in one regard, by reminding me just why I do my best to avoid film festivals.
The night’s Rwandan offerings -
The Consequence and
Better In Than Out - are met with rapturous applause, as much for their homespun charm, I suspect, as for the fact that they’re not Belgian. Afterward there’s a long train of speeches, in which anyone who’s so much as set foot inside a cinema is asked to say a few words. Dignitaries are welcomed, sponsors thanked, young filmmakers greeted with energetic whoops from the crowd. When the Minister of Sports and Culture, Hon. Joseph Habineza, takes to the podium to renew the government’s commitment to the arts, he’s showered with applause.
“If we all tell our stories, we can become rich!” he says, energetically pumping his fist. Jubilation from the audience. A European film crew, he notes, has just wrapped up production on a movie shot in Rwanda. In just two weeks, €1 million found its way into the country’s coffers. “Of course we need to eat,” he says, “but you can sell movies and eat better!”
There’s laughter and applause from the crowd, followed by an awkward silence as we realize he’s being deadly serious. Looking earnest and perplexed, he adds, “I don’t think in Hollywood they grow potatoes.” Uncomfortable shuffling commences from the front row. Someone coughs. After another rousing call for Rwandans to trade in their ploughshares for story boards, the minister takes his seat, folds his hands in his lap, and stares slightly crestfallen toward the front of the room.
It’s a long, brutal ceremony, and by the time the festival is officially inaugurated and the band strikes up its first few tunes, we’re all of us ready for a drink. The Primus and Mützig flow freely, the crowd handsomely mingles by the bar and spills out into the brisk Rwandan night. If these are Kigali’s A-listers, they’re a pretty swank set: women in colorful bangles and elaborate headwraps, guys in fedoras cocked at raffish angles - even a certain scruffy travel writer who’s bought a new shirt for the occasion. I meet young directors and aspiring photographers; I meet an actor who describes himself as “the Brad Pitt of Rwanda.” I meet a blinged-out rapper in a Gatsby-esque, three-piece suit with more layers of white than a wedding cake. It is a beautiful, inspired night. On our way back to Le Caverne, me and Piotr are almost drunk with giddiness (or, perhaps, just drunk with drunkenness). It’s impossible, after a night like this, not to feel hopeful for Rwanda. And it’s not until the morning, grappling with hangovers both physical and metaphorical, that I wonder if 14 years is really enough time for this country to bury its dead.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.653s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 30; qc: 136; dbt: 0.3674s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
Nonplussed
non-member comment
...and then the circus left town! Another wonderfully shrewd and funny post. Thanks.