Special Screening: “My Neighbor, My Killer” by Anne Aghion, Out of Competition

The documentary featured at tonight’s Special Screening, My Neighbor, My Killer, directed by Anne Aghion, is about the painful after-effects of the Rwandan genocide. "How can you ever forgive the people who killed your children?" asks the film. For ten years, French documentary filmmaker Aghion travelled Rwanda, filming attempts at reconciliation between Tutsis and Hutus in this genocide-scarred land. In 2001, the government set up a system of Gacaca courts, local tribunals where Rwandans are in charge of judging their neighbors. It is an experimental reconciliation effort in which murderers who confess to their crimes are released. The traumatized survivors are then supposed to forgive them, and coexist peacefully alongside them, right next door.

"I found the Gacaca court idea incredibly bold," Aghion admits. "The point is not only to pin each crime on a specific culprit, but also to bring the truth out into broad daylight – just like the genocide, which is continually described as having taken place in broad daylight. In addition, the purpose of the Gacaca courts is cathartic. It should enable the Rwandan hill peoples, Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa, to re-weave the social bonds with which they lived peacefully for generations… Like many other descendants of survivors of the Shoah growing up in France after the war, I felt an almost therapeutic need to understand, and especially to feel, what my parents’ generation had experienced as the cataclysm became part of the past. Post-genocidal Rwanda gave me a glimpse of the bottomless pain that had surrounded me as a child, but was expressed so rarely."