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“Rwanda and Juliet” is the story of staging a classic tragedy in post-genocide Rwanda
When director Ben Proudfoot took on a project to follow retired Dartmouth University professor Andrew Garrod to Rwanda, he was perhaps a little unprepared for the movie he was about to make. Then just 22, he made a spur of the moment decision to film the 67-year-old academic’s trip to Kigali to put on a Shakespearean theatre production.
“I talked to Andrew on Skype and he is such a character, he really had his ideas about how this was going to go and I basically dropped everything and shot this film,” Proudfoot told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival.
Garrod’s vision was for a Rwandan version of Shakespeare tragedy Romeo and Juliet, supplanting Capulets with Hutus and Montagues with Tutsis. Garrod’s play was an attempted reconciliation theatre, using young actors to address the legacy of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days of slaughter.
“I think the challenge is today is how do you reach an audience, an audience who doesn't know about the subject. The people who understand and know the weight of the Rwandan genocide, already understand and know the weight of the Rwanda genocide and making another documentary that appeals to that demographic isn't necessarily going to move the needle,” Proudfoot said.
Rwanda & Juliet | Official Trailer from Breakwater Studios Ltd. on Vimeo.
Mixing backstage documentary with on-stage drama, “Rwanda and Juliet” portrays today's young Rwandans navigating life more than 20 years after the genocide.
The play had a cast of Rwandans who have firsthand experience of the massacre, such as Clarisse, a young actress with a Hutu mother and Tutsi father who joined the play in order to reconcile her parents.
But Garrod's boundary- pushing ideas didn't always play out well with the young actors, said Proudfoot, and even the play’s local producers were sometimes uneasy, despite his well-intentioned premise of fostering reconciliation.
Backstage, the play’s fierce Juliet, Tete, who Proudfoot calls “the most interesting character,” at one point has very negative feelings about the production and questions Andrew's motivations for producing the play.
“When you leave here, back to America or wherever, tell your white people, your white friends not to come back to Rwanda again talking about reconciliation, we don’t need it anymore,” she says in the film.
"I don’t feel like it is the right time to have this play just for teaching people about reconciliation, because we already have reconciliation [….] we don’t know who is Hutu, we don’t know who is Tutsi and we don’t care about that.”
The talented cast thrive in Shakespearean scenes devised to be spoken in English, French and the local Kinyarwanda language but a final pivot to the story sees the production turned on its head and many of the cast in revolt.
Although ultimately it fails to answer the big questions it poses about the redemptive power of theatre versus well-intentioned but naive Western altruism, the themes linger as the film draws to a close.
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