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The first feature film on Rwanda's 1994 genocide was shown at the weekend in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, news organisations reported. The film, "100 days", a love story set against the background of the genocide in 1994, was shown amid emotional scenes, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported.
The film was directed by a Briton, Nick Hughes, who witnessed the massacres first-hand while working as a television cameraman, the BBC said. He describes the film as a testimony to the survivors of the three-month period in which at least 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists.
It was produced by a Rwandan, Eric Kabera, BBC said. It had already been shown at film festivals around the world following its premiere at the Toronto film festival, it added.
"The film has stirred some powerful emotions as I remembered what I saw happening here during the genocide," AP quoted Claude Musabe, a Hutu businessman who watched the film, as saying. "It is a depiction of the darkest hours in Rwanda's history."
The US $1.5 million production centres on two young lovers whose lives and dreams are shattered by the slaughter, AP said. The film avoids graphic depiction of the massacres, in which victims were chased into maize fields and banana plantations and hacked to death by machete-wielding militiamen bent on ethnic extermination, AP added.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
