The Spirits of 1000 Hills
2° 'LIBERO BIZZARRI' AWARD
Va EDIZIONE PREMIO NAZIONALE DOCUMENTARIO ITALIANO
SILVER SPIRE AWARD
41° SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
54th VENICE BIENNALE
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Directed by Isabella Sandri / creative documentary / prod. Gaundri srl in collaboration with Edilight and Palomar / 40 min. / Beta SP / year 1997 / Italy
Il Film
I wrote some words to add impressions, notes, informations to the last images, as well as I did in the rest of the work. In these images there are some children remained alone. They are very young and they take care of other babies younger than them. In the beginning I edited those words there, but after I removed them. I’ve lost them on the way. Right words cannot exist, they have not to exist; nobody has to learn, create, use some words to understand, to handle, to fix, to describe this pain. That is, the pain of two genocides. So the only thing that remains is a mood without sun and colours. Like an unfair and unending rainy day.
Synopsis
March-April 1997: some of them managed to return home alive. Very few, out of the two million who fled their country three years before. They are Hutu women arriving to Gisenyi, on the Rwandan border. They are coming from ex-Zaire (now the Congo Republic), having travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot. They have lost their children. Incredibly, they have managed to survive the attacks of Kabila’s rebels – and other soldiers whose identity is unclear but all of Tutsi origin – in the refugee camps, the rivers and the equatorial forests. The attacks were programmed, intended to weaken a people vulnerable and defenceless.
In Kigali, on the other hand, live the other survivors, those who escaped from the massacre of 1994. They are the Tutsi women. They have tried to rebuilt their lives, their families, their houses. They have learnt the art of bricklayer, learnt to square corners and mix cement and now they are brickmakers.
Hutu and Tutsi women recount the experiences of the last three years, after the genocide of April to July 1994. They are tales of horror which should not be ignored even if the rainy season washes away the signs of repeated murder. Even then, in 1997, every month, more than five hundred people were killed feeding the uninterrupted river of death in the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’ as Rwanda is called.
Credits
Story and screenplay Isabella Sandri
Photography and camera Isabella Sandri
Editing Erika Manoni
Music Epsilon Indi
Production organizer Monica Sandri, Alessandro Bolzoni
Production and Distribution coordinator Giovanni Saulini
Post production assistant Vincenzo Saccone
Sound Post-production S.A.M. by Mirco Mencacci
Sound Mixer Stefano Campus, Alessandro Feletti, Paolo Segat
Produced by Giuseppe M. Gaudino for Gaundri, in collaboration with Edilight and Palomar
Cast
The Narrator Diego Ribon
and with:
Violette
Annonciate
Anastasie
Marie
and the women of the Association ‘Barakabaho’ of Kigali (Rwanda)