Barnard alumna film tracks Rwandan justice after genocide

“I never really wanted to find out who killed whom, and that sort of thing,” said documentary filmmaker and alumna Anne Aghion, BC ’82. Her latest work, “My Neighbor, My Killer,” takes place in Rwanda, where approximately 75 percent of the Tutsi population was murdered in 1994, often by neighbors who had known their victims all their lives. “One of my intentions was never to substitute myself for justice,” Aghion explained.

She has nevertheless spent the last decade working in Rwanda. Her latest film tracks the procedures of the Gacaca courts, an informal system of justice established in 2001. Roughly 11,000 small courts held proceedings throughout the country, but Aghion readily acknowledges the limited scope of her film—it focuses on one tiny community in the countryside, which had limited media exposure in the wake of the genocide.

The documentary’s micro-perspective heightens the conflicted intimacy of the proceedings. “What I wanted to see was how people found a way to re-knit the social fabric of their communities,” Aghion said. One purpose of the Gacaca trials—which continue to operate today—is to provide reconciliation and to unite a battle-scarred Rwanda.

The ethical implications of these trials are breathtaking, as ravaged communities come together to reconstruct history on the hope of forgiveness. Yet “My Neighbor” does not sensationalize its subject, instead remaining respectfully distant from the villagers. The static and visually arresting images do not pretend to recreate direct experience, but instead document the complex emotions at work in the village years after the bloodshed.

Aghion intentionally chose to avoid depicting overt violence in the work. She accumulated 350 hours of footage in the course of filming, and explained that much of the subtle psychology of the film took time to grasp. She worked with several translators, but admitted, “What I realized afterwards was that I zoned out. I didn’t really listen to the interpretation.” It was only as she worked to create the feature film that she fully grasped the emotions at work: “It’s in the editing room that I really understood what people had said, and in the editing room that I had the nightmares.”

Aghion observed, “It turned out that after a genocide—and I assume after any conflict of that magnitude and nature—people didn’t talk in front of people unless they have to.” Despite this initial caution, the villagers were eventually happy to have been part of the documentary. Aghion screened the film in a local church filled with 300 people. Afterward, she recalled, the secretary of the Gacaca said he was “happy the film existed, because the notebooks he had been making might get burned or torn or disappear, but the film would not go away. The story of the community was told.”

Success has followed Aghion’s film—she has screened it in Rwanda to audiences of prisoners, administrators of justice, and relief workers. She has also shown the documentary in Haiti, Lebanon, Israel, Uganda, and Kenya. She has even heard stories about bootleg copies being shown in Malaysia. This resonance earned the film the honor of being an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival.

Aghion does not know what her next project will be, but said that her first priority is to preserve the archive of 350 hours, whether in a university or online, for future research and study. “This work can have a real impact in creating a dialogue among people,” she said.