Munyurangabo

Munyurangabo

97 minutes

Munyurangabo is the first feature film made in the Kinyarwanda language, the result of a filmmaking class director Lee Isaac Chung taught in Rwanda. As much as I try, I’m not capable of separating this fact from the film itself. For me, that alone makes it worth seeing; it’s our first cinematic view into another culture. It’s an excellent feature, wonderfully observed and wholly worth viewing on its own merits, but this natural curiosity it raises is unavoidable. I’m trying to separate the two because I don’t want to be inadvertently dismissive of the film through thoughtless praise, but I can’t. So there’s your caveat.

Chung, being an outsider, is just as much a victim of this, and he has the confidence and the wisdom to not impose himself upon the film. He watches things unfold, using this curiosity as a means of narrative propulsion. At the beginning of the film we see the film’s titular Ngabo (Jeff Rutagengwa) steal a machete from a market stall. The film suddenly cuts and we see Ngabo standing, looking at his machete. A close-up reveals it’s bloody, the camera pans up to his face, he stares, the camera pans back down and it is clean. Rwanda’s violent history haunts every frame of this film. The underlying tension is inescapable, and it colors our perception of this ambiguous image. Is the bloody machete indicative of an event from Ngabo’s past or is it an intention for the future, or both?

When Ngabo and his friend, Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye), arrive at Sangwa’s family home after a long journey, they are reticently welcomed. Sangwa’s father resents his three-year absence and lack of communication. We are just as in the dark as he is – all we know is that the two boys met in Kigali at some point and became friends. A tension develops between them when Sangwa starts thinking about staying home rather than continuing on their journey to murder the man who killed Ngabo’s father. Over time Sangwa’s father, a Hutu, can no longer continue trying to welcome Ngabo, a Tutsi, and they are forced to move on, but in the wake of being banished, they banish one another as well. The resentment comes from the past, not from anything in the present that either boy has control over. The film suggests that it is this lack of unity that is ultimately holding Rwanda back. The crops aren’t coming in and families are starving – these are more immediate and tangible problems – but the lack of a foundation upon which to rebuild, the lack of a unified Rwandan people, is the biggest obstacle the country faces.

Munyurangabo has a literary sense of association; ideas are given room to dance around each other. When I wrote earlier that Chung does not impose himself upon the film, I didn’t want to downplay his role in its excellence; the quality of the experience, the fullness and sense of cohesion, is the direct result of his wonderful openness. If he is an outsider, as we are, then his vantage point is the one we are working with to make sense of the things that are unfolding before us. He doesn’t try to explain or feed us any conclusions; we are left to make our own connections. His clear-eyed and patient shooting style, coupled with his ability to visually shift gears when required, leaves the images open to interpretation. This gives the film a powerful feeling of genuine exploration, a reinforcement of the world’s vastness of possibility.

by Andrei Alupului