Rwanda - Beyond the Deadly Pit by Gilbert Ndahayo

The ability to forgive is a value deeply cherished in our culture: one of the moral concepts that rational ethics gratefully adopted from its daddy, Christianity. Our positive understanding of forgiveness as something inherently human seems so intuitive that we presuppose every human being should have the ability to forgive, and that everybody should treasure it the same way we do. Those who do not need to be educated, be it with the help of the Bible or through political actions.

In Rwanda – Beyond the Deadly Pit local filmmaker Gilbert Ndahayo profoundly questions this notion of forgiving, unmasking it as a weapon of oppression and paternalism used by the international community to dictate how Rwanda is to deal with its genocidal past. Ndahayo’s personal investigation into the circumstances of his parents’ racially motivated murder structures the film’s narrative trajectory, with sidesteps into different facets of a society in permanent shock. With rough and shaky 4:3 mini-DV imagery and jarring editing, he lets the viewer visually experience the pain of a quest leading him through the Gacaca courts dealing with the punishment of perpetrators, sites of mass killings and events of public commemoration.

It is not the concept of forgiveness which Ndahayo finally destroys but the unquestioning way in which the West forces communities to integrate it into their politics, value systems and individual destinies. Ndahayo shows how terribly painful the actual process of forgiving is, in fact too painful and demanding for many people to complete. No Jesus, no UN committee, no enlightened philosopher can tell a human being how to deal with grief and anger. To forgive means nothing once it ossifies into a moral concept. The act of forgiving is the outcome of a battle which can be lost at any moment.

by Nino Klingler