A genocide killed more than 800 people in 1994 in Rwanda, Africa, bringing great destruction. Years later, Brazilian documentary filmmaker and journalist Ana Terra Athayde walked the streets of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, looking for testimonies from young people who grew up while the country was recovering from the massacre. The result of this work was the documentary Children of Rwanda, which has just been completed.
The film will be shown for the first time at Unicamp on September 11th, at 14:30 pm, in the auditorium of the Unicamp School of Corporate Education (Educorp). The event is promoted by the Coordination of Interdisciplinary Research Centers and Nuclei (Cocen) in conjunction with the Chair of Refugees at Unicamp. Entry is free. Watch Video to an excerpt from the film.
After showing 45 minutes of documentary, documentary filmmaker and journalist Ana Terra Athayde was invited to participate in a debate on the topic, alongside Lúcia Ramos Monteiro, cinema researcher at ECA-USP; and Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel, coordinator of Cocen, who is a historian and documentary filmmaker.
The idea, when putting this topic on the agenda, is to encourage a type of discussion based on an audiovisual product, a form of manifestation that is distinct from the textual one and that brings new elements such as image. Ana Carolina adds that documentary filmmaker Ana Terra brought to the film the dimension of overcoming, "of how the population recovered after the genocide."
Ana Terra tells a little about the story of the film. She was selected by IWMS (International Women's Media Foundation) as fellow to report in Africa out of interest in seeing how the country had rebuilt itself after the genocide. He encountered harsh stories. "There were neighbors killing neighbors, family members killing family members. Reconciliation was only possible thanks to an effort by the population and the government. People were able to create art, create companies and create a future," she says.
In Rwanda, 78% of the population is under 35 years old, reports Ana Terra. "It is a young population that bears the marks of a past of genocide and a present of reconstruction. Sixty-four percent of the parliament is made up of women", reports Ana Terra, admired by the female protagonism in politics and in that society.
The massacre, by ethnic Hutu extremists against Tutsis and moderate Hutus, wiped out a tenth of the country's population in just 100 days. The people rose up and today live peacefully with the murderers. On the last Saturday of each month, the population gathers for a collective effort (called umuganda) in order to rebuild what was lost.
"When people come to Rwanda, they think that Rwandans, especially the younger ones, feel a little disturbed because of what happened here. They only think about the genocide. They think that you are different from other people, maybe because you have this whole story, because their parents may have participated in the genocide. When people come to Rwanda, they are surprised to see that we have turned this dark page in our history", says Serge Nors, 21 years old, one of the characters in the documentary.
