In Ben’Imana, the perpetrators of a genocide are being put on public trial, but it just as often feels like the families of their victims are being forced to plead their case. The first Rwandan film to premiere in Cannes’ official selection is set in 2012, a generation removed from the 1994 atrocities in which at least a half-million members of the Tutsi ethnic group were systematically, brutally murdered by the Hutu-led government’s forces. In the years since, leaders have nobly prioritized reconciliation between the communities without letting murderers off the hook. For the children born in the genocide’s wake, friendships and relationships have been forged, with one young character happily boasting that “our generation will not tolerate prejudice.” But for those who were there and suffered—or bought into the propaganda so much they still deny the full extent of the barbarism inflicted—mending relationships is still a herculean task when the survivors in different communities have such drastically different interpretations of events. The genocide survivors are repeatedly asked to “forgive.” Is that even possible when those being forgiven are still reluctant to accept a genocide even took place?
Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi plays Veneranda, a survivor who has been tasked with leading reconciliation efforts in her community, although her groups end up being entirely female; as one attendee attests, the men in their families are either dead or in prison. They’ve all been brought together with the intent of expressing the wounds from that dark period in what are essentially group-therapy sessions, but these hit a wall fast––there are mass walkouts in one after a victim’s emotive account of assault is met with dismissal at use of the term genocide. Although leading the cause to seek justice and heal wounds, Veneranda still can’t fully mask personal prejudices when her teenage daughter is expelled from school due to pregnancy––her boyfriend’s family is from a different background, and as someone violently assaulted during the genocide, she struggles coming to terms with a relationship that threatens to drag those memories back to the fore.
Director Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo’s film isn’t challenging for its harrowing, explicit descriptions of violence from victims, but for the way her screenplay (co-written with Delphine Agut) offers no clear resolution to inter-community tensions even decades removed from crimes. The repeated pleas for the victims to “forgive” become increasingly condescending and unhelpful as the film progresses, and we hear in-depth court testimonies recounting assaults and prolonged murders (adults and children alike) that would test a saint’s need to absolve the defendants of their sins. Forgiveness may be necessary for the elders in a community to move forward with their children, but due to the set-up of the courts (where references to specific ethnicities have been outlawed to focus on the crimes themselves), there are still barriers towards a proper reckoning with these horrors. The genocide is the eternal elephant in the room, with Dusabejambo effectively depicting a polite society weaned off addressing it directly; it’s only during the trial sequences where the lingering anguish is made powerfully explicit, with some of the most powerful courtroom sequences since the recent resurgence of that genre.
There are no highly stylized sequences in Ben’Imana, but the recurring factor of genocide perpetrators and their families either deludingly or willingly downplaying—even outright denying—their crimes brought Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Look of Silence to mind. There are no echoes of the infamous final scene of its companion piece The Act of Killing (later referenced in The Zone of Interest), where a war criminal threw up once conscious of what he’d perpetrated; even awaiting sentencing after decades behind bars, the defendant in the main trial still can’t accept any version of events that depicts him as a rapist or murderer. Instead, Dusabejambo unflinchingly approaches a genocide by highlighting the skewed perspectives of those responsible, just as Oppenheimer had his subject––whose older brother was slayed in the mid-1960s Indonesian mass killings––speak to those responsible, with only a younger daughter born generations later shown to be horrified by the accounts. The seeds of a future no longer in denial about past horrors are present within Ben’Imana, although both filmmakers pose the same question: whether generational accountability means anything if those that came before still haven’t atoned.
The journalist Omar El Akkad famously propositioned, in the early days of the Gaza genocide, that “one day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” It struck a chord because of widespread hypocrisy by Western governments to acknowledge clear crimes of humanity which were appearing on social media feeds the world over, but could equally be discussing previous atrocities––the Rwandan genocide unfolded for as long as it did because of a lack of international response, even when the media were less hesitant to label it as a genocide. But the key part of Akkad’s quote is that a reckoning will only happen “when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable,” which is echoed here. Court punishments prove futile if time behind bars hasn’t helped any of the war criminals comprehend their actions to begin with and victims are facing renewed pressure to forgive without cultural atonement. While reconciliation schemes like those depicted in Ben’Imana are still crucial, Dusabejambo’s film is powerful for the way it intelligently lays out their shortcomings, offering no easy answers about how divides can be satisfactorily healed. With the continued lack of accountability for the massacre in Palestine, its observations are likely to prove as prescient as they are distressing.
Ben’Imana premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.