Bisesero: A Daughter’s Story – Producer’s Statement
The filmography about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, one of the most significant events in 20th Century African history, is vastly underserved in the cinema. Approximately 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered by Hutu extremists as the world did nothing.
The handful of major films about this event have been told through Western lenses, and have often fictionalized or distorted events for the sake of story that Western audiences would respond to. Thus we see numerous Western characters real or imaginary (“Shooting Dogs”), or ‘heroes’ who were not heroic (“Hotel Rwanda”), or fictional characters borrowing a bit of story from many different events including some that happened years later (“Sometimes in April’).
These films are also aging, having mostly come out in the early 2000’s, and thus there is an entire generation in Africa and internationally that have no acquaintance with this event through the power of cinema. History is not well served when not taught and demonstrated, and “Bisesero: A Daughter’s Story” is a much needed refresher. By comparison, over 400 films about the Holocaust have been made, and there are new releases nearly every year some 70 years after the fact.
“The film is based on true events and actual people, written and directed by African artists and producers. The POV is also unique: few if any of the major films have a Tutsi protagonist, and telling this story from the POV of a teen age girl brings a new level of humanity to the story.”
There is one other vitally important aspect to this film that also sets it apart from it’s Western-made vintages of 2005. The Epilogue brings the Rwanda story up to date, showing how a couple of decades or more later, how the resilience, reconciliation and determination of Rwanda has lead to one of Africa’s most incredible success stories. “Bisesero: A Daughter’s Story” ends on that note of hope, re-birth and renewal, completing an arc about one of the most horrific events in African modern history.
Richard Hall
Producer
June 25, 2024
