\n\t\u201cI forgive\u201d are the first words uttered by V\u00e9n\u00e9randa in Ben\u2019Imana, 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, Cl\u00e9mentine U. Nyirinkindi brings V\u00e9n\u00e9randa\u2019s resolve and all her painful contradictions to life in Ben\u2019Imana, a searing and intimate portrait of a nation\u2019s reckoning.<\/p>\n
\n\tWriter-director Marie-Cl\u00e9mentine Dusabejambo\u2019s drama is set in the Rwandan village Kibeho in 2012. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s both emblematic and achingly specific.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tBen\u2019Imana\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tMother courage.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Cast: Cl\u00e9mentine U. Nyirinkindi, Kesia Kelly Nishimwe, Isabelle Kabano
Director: Marie-Cl\u00e9mentine Dusabejambo
Screenwriters: Marie-Cl\u00e9mentine Dusabejambo, Delphine Agut
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 41 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe person V\u00e9n\u00e9randa 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 V\u00e9n\u00e9randa and her sister Suzanne (a riveting Isabelle Kabano, who starred in Eric Barbier\u2019s Small Country) survive. Suzanne\u2019s fury is as explosive as her sister\u2019s is contained. Contending to the judge (Adelite Mugabo) that V\u00e9n\u00e9randa \u201chas no right to forgive on behalf of our family,\u201d she\u2019s determined to bring Karangwa to justice.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd she has no use for the community meetings that V\u00e9n\u00e9randa has begun leading, in her role as the district\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cRwanditude\u201d program, designed to reunite Rwandans after years of ethnic conflict and bloodshed.<\/p>\n
\n\tJust as mentions of ethnicity are verboten in the courts, there\u2019s 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\u2019s title is a Kinyarwanda word that emphasizes a collective identity, rather than the ethnic divisions of Tutsi and Hutu that Rwanda\u2019s European colonizers encouraged and enforced.)<\/p>\n
\n\tThe younger generation, personified by V\u00e9n\u00e9randa\u2019s 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 V\u00e9n\u00e9randa holds herself as a model of forgiveness to women in the group, she can\u2019t see past Richard\u2019s Hutu heritage, and she turns a cold heart to Tina when she becomes pregnant and is kicked out of school. \u201cNeither Richard or his family has harmed me,\u201d Tina points out reasonably, while her mother fumes with shame and judgment, her inner turmoil finding expression in a baffling hypocrisy.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs harsh as she can be, V\u00e9n\u00e9randa 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. V\u00e9n\u00e9randa 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. \u201cCan\u2019t you stop your bullshit on forgiveness?\u201d she hisses at V\u00e9n\u00e9randa, and urges her to reveal certain long-hidden truths to Tina.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat binds these two is the depth of what they\u2019ve endured, the unspeakable brutality; what divides them is how they respond to it. Ben\u2019Imana 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\u2019s broken but still hopeful heart.<\/p>\n
\n\tDusabejambo, working from a screenplay she wrote in collaboration with Delphine Agut, is attentive to her characters\u2019 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 V\u00e9n\u00e9randa\u2019s 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\u2019Imana contains whole worlds in one very specific here-and-now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI forgive\u201d are the first words uttered by V\u00e9n\u00e9randa in Ben\u2019Imana, but her ferocious gaze and the clamp…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[47241,173028,10532,194219,93,61,60,270,198411],"class_list":["post-457405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-cannes-reviews","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-un-certain-regard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}