New Genocide movie to premiere soon

A new Rwandan film, Ubucyeye(dawn), premiered to a small audience of journalists in Kigali on Monday, March 2, with the public premiere scheduled soon during the upcoming 18th Genocide commemoration period.The film Ubucyeye (92 minutes), Kinyarwanda with English subtitles, was directed and produced by Trésor Mukunzi. Executive producers are Philbert Kabano and Jean Claude Niyibizi, while the main characters are played by Steven Ndayizigiye, Sandra Uwase, Vivian Musabwamana. The film tells a story of a young Rwandan who fled the Genocide and went to Burundi, but returned to Rwanda to seek the truth about the death of his father which was plotted by his (father’s) friends during the Genocide to take his property.Mukunzi said that the movie was inspired by what happened during the Genocide and that he hopes it will restore hope amongst Rwandans. “The principle message of this film is hope. After the Genocide and after losing his parents, the main character had to find hope, fight and not to give up in life – because he believes that there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Mukunzi told The New Times.Apart from being a filmmaker, 24-year-old Mukunzi holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). The filming started in January, last year, in different parts of Kigali and at the Rwanda-Burundi border. “The final process delayed because I was in my final year at university and I had to put a lot of emphasis on my books,” he said Mukunzi. The self-taught filmmaker added that Ubucyeye is his first film and that he had never stepped on a movie set or seen people shooting a film before.“I just went with the little knowledge I had. We also had very little resources; it was only the will of the people involved in this project. The cast and the technical staff were all my friends, so we used the little resources we had to come up with this movie,” Mukunzi said.“I literally had no time to train them because they were students and I was also a student at the time. They would come from their respective schools in uniform and I had to improvise,” he added.His second-to-be film dubbed “The Other”, about a group of thieves who are planning a hit on corrupt government officials – is also underway. Synopsis The film starts with a group of Interahamwe militias chasing the family and killing a man. A woman screams in horror begging them not to kill her husband– a little kid escapes and runs for his dear life. After surviving the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, Roland (Steven Ndayizigiye) returns to Rwanda from Burundi, after seventeen years. After witnessing his father’s brutal murder, he now wonders whether his mother still exists. Godeliva (Mireille Akimana), Roland’s mother, is also languishing in sadness about the death of her son when the killers slay her husband in her presence, but she survives because they want to use her as a sex object to satisfy their sexual desires from which she later contracts HIV/AIDS. Roland finally meets his mother in a hospital in Kigali where she is admitted; but she dies after a very short time before she tells him how his father was killed and how she managed to survive the Genocide.The troubled teenager is left all by himself without even knowledge of his relatives; he is doing all he can to discover the truth about the death of his father.

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New Genocide movie to premiere soon