Film on Rwanda’s Struggle with Reconciliation Takes Top Prize

Reconciliation doesn't come easily, but it does come.

Laura Waters Hinson has seen the process firsthand.

The 26-year-old Florida native who graduated from Furman in 2004 has spent the past three years working on a film about the process of reconciliation in the wake of the genocide in Rwanda.

Last month, the film won the Gold Medal Award for Documentary at the Student Academy Awards, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

But the young filmmaker says it may take her the rest of her life to process what "reconciliation" truly means.

"Maybe I was kind of naive a bit about what it would entail," Hinson says now, in retrospect. "I had never made a film in an African country before, I had only film students with me; we were inexperienced."

Nothing could have prepared her for a dialogue between the victims of genocide and the murderers who committed the crimes, she says. "But I was just so compelled that I never questioned for a minute."

Hinson began her journey of discovery on a trip to Rwanda in 2005. Then a graduate student in film at American University, she traveled to the war-torn African nation with a church group. She had learned about the impoverished country while studying political science and communications at Furman, and she had researched the political upheaval and cultural genocide that for three months in 1994 held the country in its grasp.

But being there was different.

During the trip, Hinson met John Rucyahana, a Rwandan Anglican bishop, and it was their meeting that led her to the epiphany that "I have absolutely got to make this film." The idea went beyond producing an A+ film thesis for school. It soon became a mission.

What Bishop John, as he is called, shared with Hinson was his country's struggle for healing through reconciliation.

"I just thought, this is one of the most profound, complex, compelling situations I've ever heard of in history," Hinson says of her film's subject. "There have been a lot of places that have experienced genocide, and some maybe have experienced some measure of forgiveness after decades and decades later, but in Rwanda, you had people trying to reconcile just 12 years later."

The tension between Rwanda's culturally different Hutus and Tutsis had historical roots in colonialism, political isolation and economic woes, but the two lived side by side, went to the same schools, the same churches, the same markets.

In 1994, the poorer Hutu ethnic majority committed genocide against the wealthier Tutsi ethnic minority, killing almost 1 million people.

Since 2005, 50,000 of the killers have been released from prison, and now killers and victims are coming face to face once again.

"It's unprecedented," Hinson says.

Nine months after her initial trip to Rwanda, Hinson packed up her camera equipment and a crew of four film students with a task she now admits was overwhelming: to tell the story of forgiveness and reconciliation through the victim and the perpetrator.

"As We Forgive" focuses on the stories of four people whom Hinson found through her translator, Emmanueal Kwizera. The choice of using only four people was both artistic and situational, says Hinson. The two victims profiled in the film lost their husbands, sisters, fathers; one can forgive, the other cannot. The perpetrators present the struggle to come to terms with what they have done and with how to face the victims of their crimes.

"It's not something that can be simplified," Hinson says. "But the genocide is already overwhelming enough for people, and I thought to survey 10 different people and try to fit them all into a one-hour documentary would just be overwhelming. I tried to find cases that I thought represented a wide variety of people, the woman who had forgiven and then the woman who hadn't forgiven representing the rest of Rwanda who's not ready to forgive yet."

To a degree, she says, they represented the country at large.

How do you ask someone why he kills? How do you ask someone to describe how it feels to watch his family die?

It is not an easy conversation to start. But it is a necessary one, says Hinson, and one that challenges her own notions about the certainties on which we depend, such as the inhumanity of people who kill.

What frightened Hinson most about the filmmaking experience wasn't the threat of violence or physical harm, but something she realized only in retrospect: how much she understood the killers.

"You could see yourself in the eyes of the killers," Hinson says, as if sharing a deeply hidden secret. "You could see, if under certain circumstances, if you weren't educated, if you were force-fed propaganda, if the machete was put in your hand and you were told kill or be killed, then you might do the same thing they did. You might kill a child or a pregnant woman.

"Normal everyday people, neighbors of their victims. I saw that was a reality. That these weren't just weirdoes who were killing, this was a huge percentage of the population that got swept into the genocide."

Hinson stops to take a breath and to process her words.

"I had to ask myself again and again, would I forgive? Would I reconcile with somebody who killed my family? And I don't know that answer," she says.

Hinson earned $5,000 and recognition among Hollywood's film elite when "As We Forgive" took the gold prize at the Student Academy Awards last month. But her work with it is not done. She plans a university tour of the film and is currently working on a study guide and a grant to get funding to take it to Rwanda to aid with reconciliation.

Though the country is still healing from the genocide that crippled it, Hinson sees hope in Rwanda's multiparty elections, the efforts at reconciliation and the spirit of the people she met there.

"As We Forgive" is a hard act for her to follow.

Hinson is toying with other film projects, including a narrative piece on a more lighthearted topic. But she's waiting for that same kind of feeling that led her to "As We Forgive."

"I'm sort of waiting for the same epiphany that I had for the Rwanda film, because you have to devote your life to it," she says. "So it has to be good."

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