Munyurangabo 2007

In this delicate, poignant film two young city men, one a Hutu, the other a Tutsi, are obliged to confront their ethnic difference for the first time when they visit the impoverished farm of the Hutu man’s family. Amazingly, this beautiful and most Afro-centric of recent African films grew from a young Korean American filmmaker’s observations while teaching at a Christian relief camp in Rwanda. The narrative and dialogue arose entirely out of the circumstances of people he and his script-writer knew. The performances unfold with unforced naturalism as though no camera were ever present. — BG

“Like a bolt out of the blue... Lee Isaac Chung achieves an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut with Munyurangabo, which is – by several light years – the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the 15-year-old genocide that wracked Rwanda.“ — Robert Koehler, Variety