“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.
Ben’Imana
The Bottom Line
Mother courage.
