“The Rwandan Night” is Ndahayo’s second feature documentary and will have its African premiere at the 2014 Zanzibar International Film Festival. The film is nominated for OusmaneSembene Award, one of the top prizes for African filmmakers.
According to the Swiss Anthropologist and one of the executive producers of the film Andrea Grieder, “Gilbert’s first film is unpleasantly rough. The Human Rights Film Festivals don’t like his work. But why?” The Nigerian Author OnyekaNwelue confirmed the facts, “Mr. Ndahayo’s images are gory… from the moment you see survivors of genocide digging out corpses from mass graves, arranging the bones in coffins, you start to shiver.”
“I don’t think I am angry enough towards what has happened,” said Gilbert Ndahayo, who lost 52 close family members including his parents and both grandparents from his mother’s side and more than 300 people from his father’s side.
Born in 1975 in the traditional village of Save (Butare), Gilbert Ndahayo currently lives in New York City. For the 20th commemoration of the genocide the Tutsis in Rwanda, he conceived, directed and edited “The Rwandan Night” which has been translated into Italian, German, French and English.
In a 2013 interview on Deutsche Welle’s “Forum des cultures” with Audrey Permentier, Gilbert Ndahayoconfirmed his plan on characters of his 480 min film trilogy about Rwanda’s history.
Ndahayo says his inspiration came from his mentor Kris Boden and his professors at Columbia University’s Grad film school especially the only two-times winner in Sundance history film director Eric Mendelsohn and the internationally renowned educator Annette Insdorf.
Filmed over the course of three years (2010 – 2013) in three countries (Rwanda, USA and Switzerland), “The Rwandan Night” is 107-minute documentary estimated at US$75,000 and executive produced by Ambassador MathildeMukantabana, Swiss Anthropologist Professor Andrea Grieder and fellow survivor Olive Mukabalisa.
Gilbert Ndahayo filmed recent testimonies of survivors in diaspora and brought to the screen the longest monologue in the recorded history of survivors in Rwanda.
At the age offour, FideleSakindi is stuck insmoke and almost burntwhen he is saved by ajigger-infested Hutu during“umusambirawaSecyugu”(the 1959 Hutu revolutionwaves code-named “TheLizard’s Share”).
Ndahayo confesses that filming the testimony of Sakindi was the hardest ever in his career. Sakindi has a scar on his forehead where he was hit with a club-studded with nails (known as ntampongano or “without pity”) in 1994. So, Ndahayo decided to film Sakindi’s half face in low angle shot.
Ndahayo says he was lucky because with the light and candles of more than eleven thousand candles of survivors gathered at the stadium in Nyamirambo in 2006, Sakindi’s face illuminates on the screen as he tells his story of survival for the first time. Sakindi accounts of his family drowned in Ndiza river in ofhis family drowned inNdizariver in 1960s.
He grew up and watched the Rwandan drama unfold over him, his country descent into the genocide in 1994. Sakindi recalls, “does one kill his neighbors, eat their cows and then set on fire their home.”
In November 2011, Ndahayo was invited to attend the third international conference at California State University, Sacramento. He interviewed the survivor MathildeMukantabana at her home. Ndahayo went on to film other eyewitnesses including AtiMosupyoe and former US Marine Lionel Rawlins among others.
When Ndahayo first visited Switzerland, Andrea Grieder took him to RigiKulm, the highest peak of Mount Rigi, also known as the Queen of Mountains. Because of the mountainous terrains, he felt the beauty and wanted to film. Now, Ndahayo has one film completed “The Rwandan Night” and another one in pipeline “The Rwandan Silence”.
Andrea Grieder remembers the experiences of making the film, “Gilbert does not oversimplify the post-genocide realities. He is dynamic, comfortable but very protective when it comes to his film work.
I invited him to come to my hometown Zürich to show his film Rwanda: Beyond The Deadly Pit, but he brought his camera and told me that he wanted to film his trip. I do not know what he was filming but he kept filming.”
In 2006, Grieder went to Rwanda as a PhD student to work on her dissertation. She says that Rwanda is sometimes called “the Switzerland of Africa”. She says, “Gilbert had hired a cameraman but at some moments, he would take the camera off the tripod and simply walk far from the scenes he was filming… just like that. I could see his determination to get images.” In the film, Andrea Grieder contributes as “the other”, and she is also filmed.
Olive Mukabalisa, one of the producers, believes that “The Rwandan Night” is a landmark in the film cult. It is an African poem on film capturing the horror of the killings of the Tutsis.
Mukabalisa recalls that Ndahayo wanted some help, but not the psychological kind of. Sharing the story about the making of the documentary, Mukabalisa intimately disclosed, “Ndahayo felt he would die if he does not make the film. He was very frustrated by watching events culminating into the complete wipe out of his family and friends. In the end, we made a film that sings to the spirit of endurance of our people.”
“The Rwandan Night” was part of the prestigious Berlinale Talent Campus Doc Station 2013 and received a production grant from Friends Of Rwanda in the United States. At its world premiere at Silicon Valley African Film Festival, Gilbert Ndahayo received the 2013 Best Documentary Feature for the film; making him the only two-times winner of SVAFF in recorded history.
His films “Scars Of My Days” (2006) and “Behind This Convent” (2008) premiered in Zanzibar. Ndahayo also won Verona African film Award and Signis Commendation for African Documentary Award at the 2008 Zanzibar International Film Festival.
“The Rwandan Night” is the first film trilogy in the Rwandan trilogy. The film will be shown on Wednesday, June 18th, 2014 at Kisiwa Hall – Double Tree, Hilton Hotel.
More information about the premiere:
http://www.ziff.or.tz/2014/06/08/rwandan-night/
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