The atrocities perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994, when almost a million Tutsis were murdered by their Hutu countrymen over the course of 100 days, remain almost unimaginable. But for her first feature film, the first Rwandan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo takes the nightmare head-on, setting her story amid the 2012 Gacaca courts—tribunals based in Rwandan tradition that were tasked with finding justice and promoting reconciliation after the genocide. The story focuses on Veneranda (Clémentine Nyirinkindi), whose public forgiveness of the man who killed her siblings touches off a firestorm within her family. Dusabejambo’s camera follows these women as they try to figure out how to move forward, their personal histories all tangled up with ghosts and unpunished murderers. It’s a testament to the first-time director that, even as she deals with the very worst of humanity, she portrays a determination to find a way through. ~SM
Winner, Camera d’Or (Best First Film), 2026 Cannes Film Festival