Rwandan Women Confront History in a Searing Drama

“I forgive” are the first words uttered by Vénéranda in Ben’Imana, but her ferocious gaze and the clamp of her arms across her chest tell a different story. At the center of a fine cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi brings Vénéranda’s resolve and all her painful contradictions to life in Ben’Imana, a searing and intimate portrait of a nation’s reckoning.

Writer-director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s drama is set in the Rwandan village Kibeho in 2012. It’s the final year of the Gacaca courts, community tribunals focused on addressing the genocidal crimes committed, neighbor against neighbor, in the previous decade. Through the character’s complex and often tense relationships with her teenage daughter, her sister and her mother, as well as with other women in her village, Dusabejambo has crafted a story that’s both emblematic and achingly specific.

The person Vénéranda officially forgives in the opening scene is Karangwa (Aime Valens Tuyisenge), the man accused of murdering her siblings and other relatives. Of the eight children their mother (Arivere Kagoyire) raised, only Vénéranda and her sister Suzanne (a riveting Isabelle Kabano, who starred in Eric Barbier’s Small Country) survive. Suzanne’s fury is as explosive as her sister’s is contained. Contending to the judge (Adelite Mugabo) that Vénéranda “has no right to forgive on behalf of our family,” she’s determined to bring Karangwa to justice.

And she has no use for the community meetings that Vénéranda has begun leading, in her role as the district’s social affairs officer. Local women are invited to share still-raw memories, to grapple together with the kinds of things that would be immaterial to the courts. Their sessions are part of the country’s “Rwanditude” program, designed to reunite Rwandans after years of ethnic conflict and bloodshed.

Just as mentions of ethnicity are verboten in the courts, there’s no such identification in these gatherings, no way of knowing whether any of these women is Tutsi or Hutu, whether her husband was murdered or is in prison for murdering, until she stands to tell her harrowing story. (The film’s title is a Kinyarwanda word that emphasizes a collective identity, rather than the ethnic divisions of Tutsi and Hutu that Rwanda’s European colonizers encouraged and enforced.)

The younger generation, personified by Vénéranda’s spirited daughter, Tina (Kesia Kelly Nishimwe), and her boyfriend, a low-key photographer named Richard (Elvis Ngabo), has grown up without ethnic labels. But while Vénéranda holds herself as a model of forgiveness to women in the group, she can’t see past Richard’s Hutu heritage, and she turns a cold heart to Tina when she becomes pregnant and is kicked out of school. “Neither Richard or his family has harmed me,” Tina points out reasonably, while her mother fumes with shame and judgment, her inner turmoil finding expression in a baffling hypocrisy.

As harsh as she can be, Vénéranda is a devoted caretaker of her mother, who has lost her voice as well as her memory and is the regal, silent watcher of the unfolding family drama. Vénéranda also tends to her sister, whose health was taken from her, along with her husband and child, during the attacks. Suzanne is electric with anger even as her physical strength dwindles. “Can’t you stop your bullshit on forgiveness?” she hisses at Vénéranda, and urges her to reveal certain long-hidden truths to Tina.

What binds these two is the depth of what they’ve endured, the unspeakable brutality; what divides them is how they respond to it. Ben’Imana offers no simple definitions of courage, but rather a feverishly human group portrait of its possible expressions, with the exceptional triumvirate of Nyirinkindi, Kabano and the radiant Nishimwe forming the story’s broken but still hopeful heart.

Dusabejambo, working from a screenplay she wrote in collaboration with Delphine Agut, is attentive to her characters’ pain and their resolve, mirrored in the vibrancy of the setting. With strong contributions from cinematographer Mostafa El Kashef, production designer Ricardo Sankara and editor Nadia Ben Rachid, the movie is cinematic in an utterly unforced way, from the first images of gently rolling hills and the sound of birdsong to the bright interiors of Vénéranda’s home and the gentle, lilting score by Igor Mabano. Just as a brief piece of voiceover narration notes that a single word, ejo, means yesterday and tomorrow, Ben’Imana contains whole worlds in one very specific here-and-now.