Gilbert Ndahayo, a Rwandan in the USA will this week launch his latest documentary, Beyond the Deadly Pit. The moving documentary will be shown in the Richard and Lucille Ice Auditorium in Melrose Hall at Linfield College.

Actor and Director Gilbert Ndahayo lost 52 members of his immediate family in the Rwandan genocide.

The killers stormed a convent in a small hill in the capital city and executed 200 Tutsis villagers, including Ndahayo’s parents, who were burned alive in a pit in his parents’ backyard.

"If one wants to be healed from the sickness, he must talk about it to the world,” Ndahayo said. "For 12 years I lived with the remains of 200 unpeaceful dead in my parents’ backyard.

I wanted to tell a story about their death, a story that has not been shown on film”, he told a US website.

Filmed over the course of three years, the 2009 production is the first personal video documentation produced by a survivor of the genocide.

Ndahayo is a recipient of the 2008 Verona Award for Best African Feature Film, a Signis Commendation for Best African Documentary and a First Time Director award for previous works, Behind This Convent (2008) and Scars of My Days (2006).

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