Jean-Claude Muhire and Ally Pacifique Mudaheranwa share two things in common: Both are aspiring storytellers and both are in a celebratory mood. The reason? The duo was recently selected among the 20 international winners in the 2015 Global Dialogues contest. 

Established in 1997, Global Dialogues is a Non-Governmental Organization based in the UK that harnesses the creative genius of young people and the power of social change media to cultivate empathy, compassion and unity in diversity.

The contest invites young people of less than 25 years from across the globe to come up with an original idea for a short film about HIV/AIDS, sexuality, violence against women, or alcohol, drugs and sex.

In all, there were 20 Rwandans shortlisted for the contest. 

Mudaheranwa’s winning entry was titled ‘La Violence faite aux femmes et aux filles’, a poignant fictional narrative. It is a tale of sexual violence, its short and long-term impact on families, and of the difficulties of pursuing justice in the face of intimidation by the perpetrator, including threats of violent reprisals.

For his part, Muhire submitted two winning fictional narratives on violence against women; Liza, and Forgive Yourself. 

‘Liza’ addresses the issue of the short and long-term social and psychological challenges facing a person who has been raped. While Forgive Yourself casts a spotlight on the machinations and manipulation of a violently abusive partner.

Mudaheranwa’s story

An S6 student at Groupe Scolaire Kabusunzu studying languages (English, Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili), Mudaheranwa first heard about the Global Dialogues Contest when the national coordinator visited their school to brief students about it. 

"I picked interest and decided to give it a try,” he says. 

Initially his idea was to make a song, but this had many challenges so he dropped the idea. 

"For a song I would have to submit just the lyrics, so someone judging it would not get my original feeling. They wouldn’t know if it was Hip Hop, R&B or gospel, or which instruments I used.”

He decided to write a story about violence against women and girls instead.

Muhire’s story

The budding filmmaker started off as a volunteer at Kimisagara Orphanage, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the welfare of street children, those from the poorest families, and those that lost their parents in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. 

It is his profound experience at the orphanage that actually birthed the story-teller in him: 

Before going to the orphanage, Muhire worked as an attendant at a nearby internet café. 

"The director, Antoine Bizimana used to come to the café to look for me so that I could write some letters for him to sponsors and other people who help the orphanage,” Muhire recalls.

Some of the orphans also used to go to the café to communicate with their sponsors. 

The next day, he sought audience with the director, who needed someone who could help him with the orphanage’s communication to sponsors. 

"At the time I was a member of the youth committee for my church parish, and I used to meet most of the kids from the orphanage at church. We sung in the choir together. It took me one week to think about how I could assist those kids, and when the month ended and I had got my salary, I told my boss I was leaving for another job,” Muhire further explains, adding:

"I didn’t go to the orphanage to work like someone who is employed. I went just to assist the founder to help those children.”

That was December 2013. 

"I realized I could be of help to these kids. I started profiling the children, trying to understand how each child lived so as to effectively search for sponsors for them. I put their stories out on the orphanage’s website.”

In January 2014, he saw an announcement for the Global Dialogues Contest, and started to read extensively about the competition.

Writing a winning script

"The profound experience I had at the orphanage made me realize that I have a responsibility to speak for those who have no voice and who can suffer in pain and silence,” he explains. 

He wrote Liza, the story of a pretty young girl, who after becoming an orphan, seeks refuge at an orphanage.

When she is 12 years old, her uncle takes her from the orphanage and brings her to live in his home and later he rapes her under the influence of drugs. 

Muhire describes Liza as his lesson to society – "a mission to see to it that wounded young girls grow up with the opportunity to become responsible adults who can become productive leaders in the community.”

"I wrote Liza because I was living with the orphans, and I wanted to show how some of those children are violated by the very people that are supposed to protect them. I wanted to fight this. To me, it was a story about the life I was living at the orphanage.” 

The filmmaker in him soon convinced him to develop the script for Liza into a movie.

"For the competition I had just written a short part of the story. I had to rewrite again to make the story bigger so that I could develop it into a fictional story.”

"In August 2014 I went to RDB to register my script, then I got some actors to feature in it. I went to the ministry of sports and culture and they gave me a recommendation, then I went to the Rwanda National Police, because the uncle who raped Liza was a drug user, and the police always fights against drug abuse. Knowing that my film addressed the issues of domestic violence and drug abuse, the police helped me. I got many sponsors because all of them clearly understood my cause.”

Liza is a 62 minutes-long feature film. 

"I use film to fight sexual violence. What I do is assist people to see what is happening around them so that they can be able to fight against it,” Muhire adds. 

The top three international winners bagged $2,500, $1,250, and $625 respectively. The seventeen other international winners received $125 each.

Muhire was the only one among the international winners to win with two scripts, hence walking away with a cash prize of $250. 

However he insists that winning the competition was not about the money:

"As a young man I was not looking for money from the competition. What they were interested in was the quality of the story, because we wrote stories to tell people something that can happen in the community, and the aim of the Global Dialogues Contest is to fight against those wrongs that can happen in society.

Winning this competition has challenged me to work even harder in what I do as a story-teller. I will be able to share my story with people from across the world who will know that I’m a story teller who just assists people to mirror the community in which they live.

He describes his win as "an honor for me, my friends, my peers, my family, and maybe even for the country.”