London film students bring Rwandan tragedy home

MARGARET SHERIDAN, INTERROBANG (FANSHAWE COLLEGE)

LONDON (CUP) — Seven student filmmakers from Ontario’s Fanshawe College are helping to tell the stories of everyday Rwandans as they live with the ghosts of the 1994 genocide and a growing AIDS epidemic.

"They aren’t entertaining stories, they’re enormously tragic," said Greg Murphy, chair of Fanshawe’s school of contemporary media. "The program was designed to bring awareness to some of these issues," said Jillian Brady, one of the student filmmakers currently studying in the college’s music industry arts program. "They wanted to send people into the field to document, and then bring home a final product to share with others."

The 11-day trip to the capital city of Kigali, funded in part by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), had students exploring the current impact of the 1994 genocide and AIDS. But before embarking on the trip, many of the students knew very little about the African nation’s recent and bloody history. "I didn’t know much about what happened," Brady said. "I wanted to learn though, because you have to be sensitive to the situation, and prepared to bring back some of that awareness." And according to Murphy, that’s exactly what they were aiming for.

"They should understand their world because it helps them to find themselves, and their strengths," Murphy explained. "We put them on the ground in a situation where there was no access to clean water for most people, no electricity, or access to education. It was forcing them outside their comfort zone and hoping that it would carry over into their lives back home."

The seven students divided into two groups once they hit the city. One began shadowing a couple of genocide survivors while the other visited local hospitals and widows’ facilities to learn about the impact of HIV and AIDS.

Brady spent most of her time with a young man named Albert whose parents were killed during the genocide. He and his sisters had fled their house and were later reunited at a displaced persons camp. He was then responsible for taking care of his sisters while he himself was still a teenager and in school. At 29, Albert is now hoping that one day he can get his master’s degree in engineering and has already written a thesis on a wireless car alarm. "Over there, not a lot of people get to go to school, or even get to dream, which is unfair because they’re talented and smart," said Brady.

Brady is hoping that the films will be completed sometime in November. Having just returned from Kigali with their raw footage, the teams have a lot of editing to do. When they are ready, both documentaries will also have a three-minute featured spot on The National.

"We put them in Rwanda with a skeleton crew to study their topics in an unknown situation," Murphy said. "Sometimes they were working from 4 a.m. through midnight without a break, so it was really tiring for them, but this sort of project helps expand the understanding of who you are and your understanding of the world, and the work we can do."

Brady remembers one experience in particular at a local church. "I went to a service which was mostly singing, and the sound was ridiculously intense. It’s how some of them heal; they sing," she explained. "Most of these people have lost family members and here they were at the church to heal, to be with people, with other people who understood how they felt."

She believes that part of the documentaries’ draw will be that they’re based on real people, but that very fact also made it more difficult to film. "Sometimes it felt like an invasion," she said, "so I didn’t pry much. Most people were willing to share, but sometimes people would wave you away, which I understood, because I’m not sure how we’d feel if people were shoving cameras in our face and trying to film our everyday lives."

Murphy echoed the sentiment. "This wasn’t a movie, these were real lives," he said.

"They captured some really compelling stories. It’s going to get a really strong emotional reaction from the audiences."

"I think the films will be cool because it’s done from a student’s perspective," Brady continued. "The happiness everyone there has, they’ve held onto it through everything. Even though so many are in such trouble, they’re the happiest people in the world, much more than us, and we have everything we need."