Rwandans relive genocide horror for film

Published Sep 27, 1999

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Todd Pitman

Kibuye, Rwanda - Brandishing machetes, rifles and nail-studded clubs, a screaming gang of bedraggled militia storm down a hill in the lakeside town of Kibuye in western Rwanda.

In front of them, two frightened young men sprint across a wooden foot-bridge and plunge into the water as the mob fires gunshots into the air and hurls huge rocks dangerously close to their heads.

Fortunately for the two boys, their pursuers are only actors in the first feature film about Rwanda's bloody 1994 genocide, a low-budget movie entitled 100 Days.

Set in a beautiful small town on the shores of Lake Kivu, the film tells the story of a two young lovers who try to survive the slaughter after their families are killed.

The story is fiction, but five years ago such scenes took place all across the central African nation, when the Hutu government called on the army, local militias and civilians to rise up and kill Tutsis in one of the 20th century's worst genocides.

An estimated 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in the 100-day killing spree before Tutsi rebels seized power and brought the bloodshed to a halt.

"There's been a lot of documentaries made about the genocide ... but the problem is that those people who watch documentaries are usually a very small intelligentsia in the West," said Nick Hughes, the film's British director and screenwriter.

"But by telling a fictional story through a feature film, we're trying to reach a much larger audience and get across some idea of what really happened here."

The film is being shot in English on a budget of $1,2 million (about R7,2 million), partly funded by Rwandan investors. Many of the ethnically mixed cast of about 100 Rwandans actually lived through the genocide.

Claude Shema, who plays a policeman in the film, emerged naked after three days and nights unconscious among a pile of corpses in eastern Rwanda during the slaughter.

"I didn't come here only to be an actor in this film, but to show people what happened here in Rwanda," said Shema.

"My parents were killed, my neighbours, my friends. It was catastrophic," he said.

"Of course, sometimes it affects me deeply ... I play a role of a criminal, but I was a victim."

38-year-old Hughes worked as a freelance television cameramen in Rwanda during the genocide, but like many of his colleagues felt he struggled to tell the full story of the bloodshed at the time.

"That's the failure, the failure was on my part if you like, that I didn't film enough then, that I didn't do anything, that nobody did anything at all," said Hughes, who devoted much of the year after the genocide to writing 100 Days, his first feature film.

Filming began in August and is expected to run until November, with a tentative release date set for the middle of next year. - Reuters

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