In Rwanda We Say… by risa
Event #47 – African Film Series launches 2005-2006 Peace and Conflict Resolution lecture series
Film #1: In Rwanda We Say… The Family That Does Not Speak Dies
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On Tuesday, September 27, Concordia’s Peace and Conflict Resolution lecture series will resume with a screening of the film In Rwanda We Say…The Family That Does Not Speak Dies, the first of 8 films in the sub-series Exploring Conflict and Its Resolution on the African Continent. The film will be shown at 6:45 p.m. in the D.B. Clarke
Theatre in the Henry F. Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, basement level). It will be followed by a response by Dr. Frank Chalk, founding co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and associate professor of history at Concordia University, and conclude with an open discussion session.
The film, directed by Anne Aghion, is an astonishing testament to the liberating power of speech, an important, intimate and fascinating examination of how, and whether, people can overcome fear, hatred and deep emotional scars after genocide, to forge a common future. Over the past several years award-winning filmmaker Aghion traveled to rural Rwanda to chart the progress and impact of the ethnic reconciliation programs there. In the film, she continues her quest to learn how the human spirit survives a trauma like the 1994 attempt to wipe out the Tutsi minority, which claimed 800,000 lives in 100 days.
About the sub-series “African Film: Conflict and Its Resolution” …
Conflict and its resolution on the African continent are often engaged
within a narrow perspective that hones in on spectacular and
headline-grabbing outbreaks of extreme violence. This perspective often
frames these outbreaks by falling back upon well-worn perceptions of
‘Africa’ as a space of primordial violence. However, these conflicts -
including recent ones in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic
of Congo – are in fact crucially conditioned by specific historical and
socio-political dynamics that often have global dimensions. These include
Africa’s place in the global economy, new religious identities, and the
circulation of mass cultural images and icons.
The series under the aegis of Concordia University’s Peace and Conflict
Resolution academic lecture series engages and examines shallow
representations of disaster in Africa by understanding conflict as the
product of broader social and historical dynamics and observing it in its
multiple, and often ‘mundane,’ forms. The eight films, mostly by African
directors, that are featured in the series avoid the pitfall of
stereotyping Africa by focusing on some of the broader dynamics of
everyday life that shape conflict and the possibilities of its resolution.
The films thus explore the ways in which Africans are negotiating conflict
along prominent social cleavages of gender, class, religion and ethnicity.
For more information about this event, contact Dr. Andrew Ivaska at (514)
848-2424 ext. 2419, or Dr. Leander Schneider at (514)848-2424, ext. 5601.
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