BEN’IMANA Discovery

Screening to be followed by a conversation with director, screenwriter and producer Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo.

Set in a rural Rwandan village, eighteen years after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s exceptional feature debut is a powerful portrait of the complex personal and societal dynamics of a nation still coming to terms with the horrors of its painful past. In 2012, during the final year of Rwanda’s community-based Gacaca courts, survivor and single mother Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) has dedicated herself to rebuilding a community where the survivors and perpetrators of mass slaughter continue to live in close proximity. As a facilitator in the country’s contested national reconciliation process, she helps villagers on either side of a seemingly impossible divide confront their harrowing shared history, a responsibility that seems to fall disproportionally on women. At home, however, the professional boundaries she has set between forgiveness, responsibility, justice and mediation become increasingly difficult to maintain when her teenage daughter, Tina (Kesia Kelly Nishimwe), becomes pregnant by a young Hutu man, just as Vénéranda is asked to forgive the fellow villager charged with killing her siblings, relatives and neighbors. Dusabejambo draws on testimony from survivors and extensive research to craft a powerful drama about the contradictions of a community living in the shadow of atrocity. For Vénéranda’s only surviving sister, Suzanne (Isabelle Kabano), reconciliation cannot come at the cost of truth and justice; for Tina, the weight of a history she did not experience nevertheless shapes the choices available to her. With a stellar ensemble of largely non-professional actors bringing these contradictions to life, and impressive cinematography by Mostafa El Kashef creating a striking contrast between the beauty of the Rwandan landscape and the painful memories embedded within it, Dusabejambo offers complexity rather than easy resolution, exploring the fragile space between confronting history and imagining a future beyond it. A landmark of Rwandan cinema, BEN’IMANA won the Caméra d’Or in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it became he first film by a Rwandan director to debut in competition at the festival and announced Dusabejambo as a major new filmmaking talent. –Abbie Algar