The Audio-visual record of a brutalised nation

In Rwanda, efforts are under way to advance a long, painful process of national healing by creating an audio-visual record of those events – in fact, of the whole of Rwandan history duri
ng the years of audio-visual recording. That is the goal of American-French filmmaker Anne Aghion, her colleagues, and an array of foundations and other supporters who are setting up the Iriba Center for Multimedia Heritage, a new archive forming in the high-altitude nation in the Central East of the continent.

The French Embassy in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, has donated a building that will house the center’s screening stations and its classes and group programs. Aghion and her colleagues, particularly Assumpta Mugiraneza, a social psychologist and political scientist trained in France, also plan to present film programs in rural communities, where most Rwandans live.

“Rwanda is still a very rural country,” says Aghion,“so there will be a mobile unit that goes around the country and that makes these documents and images available, beyond the capital. The people in the countryside, who are really the most disenfranchised and poor people in the country, will still have access to all that history.”

The archive will be available only in Rwanda. “This is for Rwandans to connect with their history,” says Aghion. “Bear in mind that this is a country where a lot of people don’t read. A lot of people don’t know how to read, and even the ones who do don’t necessarily read. So audiovisual stuff is important. It’s a way for them to connect with their historical past.”

The archive will cover all of Rwandan history, but with an inevitable emphasis on the genocide that nearly destroyed the country. Aghion has been working to preserve that history for 11 years. She spent a decade in one small mountain hamlet, a community of about 1,000 people, creating most unusual documentation of how they dealt with the genocide.

To read the full story visit the Moving Image Archive website

Source: International Councl on Museums Human Rights Working Group Newsletter August 2011

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