Presented in Un Certain Regard, the film marks a historic moment for Rwanda in the Cannes Official Selection. But Ben’Imana is not interested in ceremony for its own sake. It is a film of aftermath, of lives shaped by the Tutsi genocide committed against the Tutsi in 1994, and by the fragile, often painful attempts to speak across the ruins it left behind. At its center is Vénéranda, a woman drawn into dialogue with victims and the families of perpetrators through the legacy of Rwanda’s community justice processes. What emerges is not a courtroom drama, but something quieter and more unsettling: an inquiry into whether a country, a family, or a soul can begin again without forgetting.
Dusabejambo builds the film around the idea of a balm, not an easy cure, but a way of tending to invisible wounds. Rather than reaching for spectacle or historical grandiosity, Ben’Imana stays close to human faces, bodies, pauses, and gestures. It understands trauma not only as testimony, but as silence: the kind that sits in a room, passes through generations, and resists neat explanation.
That sense of restraint shaped the filmmaking itself. The set, as Dusabejambo describes it, became less a conventional workplace than a space of concentration, emotional discipline, and creative resistance. There were moments when the mechanics of cinema seemed to disappear, leaving only the raw presence of the characters and the weight of the history they carried. When words became insufficient, the film turned to bodies and expressions, allowing silence to become its own form of speech.
The casting is essential to this emotional architecture. Dusabejambo sought faces that could hold a story before a single line was spoken. Many of the women in the film are non-professional performers, while Isabelle Kabano, known internationally for Petit Pays, brings a different kind of cinematic experience. Crucially, women connected to the histories being evoked were also present on set, making the boundary between performance, memory, and witness deliberately porous. The result is a film in which acting becomes less about representation than surrender, a search for dignity through exposure.
Rwanda itself is not treated as background. The country’s hills, horizons, and rolling topography become a character: a keeper of secrets, a witness to confrontation, a geography of memory. In Dusabejambo’s vision, every hill seems to conceal another, just as every story contains another wound, another inheritance, another unresolved question. The landscape does not merely frame the drama; it carries it.
At its deepest level, Ben’Imana is an intergenerational love letter. Dusabejambo resists the temptation to judge the past from the comfort of the present. Instead, she asks what each generation owes to those before it, and how dignity might be preserved even in the act of revisiting unbearable histories. The film does not seek to close the conversation around trauma and reconciliation. It opens one, tenderly, painfully, and with rare patience.