The Rwandan Filmmaker

I want my audience to feel the same way I feel. I want my films to stand out from conventional films. I draw upon American Classic Cinema, Franco-Italian New Wave and Russian montage technique to (...) creates my own films. My ancestors were all storytellers in the Nyiginya King’s courtyard. Today, I feel the need to retell not only the tragic story of my country (Rwanda) but also African stories at a deep psychological level. These are stories that are not shown on television from within, they are only told by the word of mouth because the culture of cinema is new to the African continent. In addition to that, there is a mythical Rwandan adage says “if you want to be healed from your sickness, you must talk about it to the world.” A film can help to heal from grief. When I am making a film, I am in constant struggle. It is a struggle to talk, to encourage people to confide in me as a man behind the camera. In the end, I am hoping and almost arriving there - that everyone is healed, myself (the filmmaker) included. My movies make references to God (meaning that the characters discuss the question of divinity). I have developed a cinematographic technique in visual and spatial terms that are specifically 3-minute long-take (mostly handheld) and usually have a 90 second for a scream and a silence on the screen. I always film all the handheld shots. I want to make movies that meditate on the human experience in a contemporary world to show complexities and compassionate connections among people. In my movies, I create rhythmic movements from abstract black and white background images to vivid foreground colors of gold and blue. I use light and dark to add a dynamic quality to space by extending patterns and forms, as in an African architecture. The fragmentation of the story is created in order to produce images that are indeterminate, fluctuating between the exterior and interior realities of the characters. I am motivated to make a film through which I pay tribute to dead and the living. Stephen Spielberg, once said, “there’s a rescue mission involved in the best movies. A person is saved from his own undoing or what other people are doing to him.” At the time I was studying cinema in Ramin Baharni, Annette Insdorf and Eric Mendelsohn classes, I came to learn about great storytellers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Verhoeven, Jim Jarmusch, Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, Elia Kazan, Alain Delon, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski. There is no doubt these filmmakers are source of inspiration and have influenced my life greatly. The way they introduce the characters and how they produce movies outside the studio system and that their work has been successful both artistically and commercially.